Anatomy of nuclear matrix elements for neutrinoless double-beta decay

  • 10 October 2007
Abstract
We show that the competition between pairing and the neutron-proton particle-particle interaction causes contributions to the neutrinoless double-beta decay matrix element to nearly vanish at internucleon distances of more than 2 or 3 fermis. As a result, the matrix element is more sensitive to short-range/high-momentum physics than one naively expects. We analyze various ways of treating that physics and quantify the uncertainty it produces in the calculated matrix elements.

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