Abstract
We revisit the mechanism of neutrinoless double beta () decay mediated by the exchange with the heavy Majorana neutrino of arbitrary mass , slightly mixed with the electron neutrino . By assuming the dominance of this mechanism, we update the well-known -decay exclusion plot in the plane taking into account recent progress in the calculation of nuclear matrix elements within quasiparticle random phase approximation and improved experimental bounds on the -decay half-life of and . We also consider the known formula approximating the dependence of the -decay nuclear matrix element in a simple explicit form. We analyze its accuracy and specify the corresponding parameters, allowing one to easily calculate the -decay half-life for arbitrary for all the experimentally interesting isotopes without resorting to real nuclear structure calculations.
- Received 20 October 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.096010
© 2014 American Physical Society