Analysis of mechanisms that could contribute to neutrinoless double-beta decay

摘要

Neutrinoless double-beta decay is a beyond the Standard Model process that would indicate that neutrinos are Majorana fermions, and the lepton number is not conserved. It could be interesting to use the neutrinoless double-beta decay observations to distinguish between several beyond Standard Model mechanisms that could contribute to this process. Accurate nuclear structure calculations of the nuclear matrix elements necessary to analyze the decay rates could be helpful to narrow down the list of contributing mechanisms. We investigate the information one can get from the angular and energy distribution of the emitted electrons and from the half-lives of several isotopes, assuming that the right-handed currents exist. For the analysis of these distributions, we calculate the necessary nuclear matrix elements using shell model techniques, and we explicitly consider interference terms.