New probes of rates of neutrinoless double beta decays
J. Suhonen* and M. Hellgren
*: corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: September 30, 2025
Published on: October 31, 2025
Abstract
Neutrinoless double-beta decay (NDBD) involves virtual transitions through states of an intermediate nucleus. The wave functions of these states can be efficiently probed by the ordinary muon capture (OMC), a process where a nucleus captures a negative muon from the lowest atomic orbital. The OMC on the NDBD daughter populates the states of the intermediate nucleus of the NDBD, like in the case of $^{136}$Xe NDBD the capture on $^{136}$Ba populates the states of $^{136}$Cs. Since both processes have similar momentum exchanges, they can populate intermediate states of high excitation energy and high angular momentum. This is how the OMC probes effectively the wave functions of all the intermediate states relevant for the NDBD. First attempts to correlate the NDBD amplitudes through the intermediate states and the OMC rates to these states have recently been performed in this NDBD system. Furthermore, the rates of NDBD and OMC depend on the value of the weak axial coupling, $g_{\textrm{A}}$. In particular, the NDBD rate is highly sensitive to the effective value of $g_{\textrm{A}}$. This effective value can be probed in the NDBD-relevant momentum exchanges by OMC, but also recently by charged-current neutrino-nucleus scattering of stopped pion neutrinos on $^{136}$I, a completely new avenue to probe NDBD.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.495.0015
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in article format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in proceeding format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.