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Joint INFN-UNIMI-UNIMIB Pheno Seminars
An effective field theory approach to neutrinoless double beta decay
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Europe/Zurich
Edificio U2, Aula 5017 (Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, U2, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
Edificio U2, Aula 5017
Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, U2, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Piazza della Scienza, 3, 20126 Milano MI, Italia
Description
Neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments probe the nature of neutrino masses and the conservation of lepton number.
A discovery in the next generation of experiments will have profound implications: it will demonstrate that neutrinos are Majorana fermions, shed light on the mechanism of neutrino mass generation, and give insight on leptogenesis scenarios for the generation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. By itself, however, the observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay will not immediately point to the underlying physical origin of lepton number violation (LNV). Disentangling different LNV mechanisms
A discovery in the next generation of experiments will have profound implications: it will demonstrate that neutrinos are Majorana fermions, shed light on the mechanism of neutrino mass generation, and give insight on leptogenesis scenarios for the generation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. By itself, however, the observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay will not immediately point to the underlying physical origin of lepton number violation (LNV). Disentangling different LNV mechanisms
requires setting up a general and flexible framework for the interpretation of neutrinoless double beta experiments and other LNV probes, and, even more importantly, achieve theoretical control on the nuclear physics input for double beta predictions.
In this talk I will discuss LNV in the framework of effective field theories. After introducing LNV interactions at the electroweak scale, I will discuss their possible manifestations at colliders. I will then match these interactions onto LNV operators at low-energy, going beyond a neutrino Majorana mass. I will derive the operators that mediate double-beta decay in chiral effective theory (chiral EFT), for light Majorana neutrino exchange and higher-dimensional LNV operators. I will show that the chiral EFT construction allows to identify components of the transition operators that had been neglected so far, and it constitute the first step towards an ab initio calculation of double beta matrix elements. I will then discuss the existing constraints on LNV interactions, and the implications for the interpretation of a signal (or lack of thereof) in the next generation of double-beta experiments.
