Eur. Phys. J. C (2011) 71: 1754
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-011-1754-7

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Neutrinoless double-beta decay and seesaw mechanism

¹ Physik-Department E15, Technische Universität München, 85748, Garching, Germany
² Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, JINR, 141980, Dubna, Moscow Region, Russia
³ Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Tuebingen, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany
⁴ Department of Nuclear Physics and Biophysics, Comenius University, Mlynská dolina F1, 842 15, Bratislava, Slovakia

^* e-mail: bilenky@gmail.com

Received: 23 August 2011
Published online: 24 September 2011

Abstract

From the standard seesaw mechanism of neutrino-mass generation, which is based on the assumption that the lepton number is violated at a large (∼10¹⁵ GeV) scale, it follows that the neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ-decay) is ruled by the Majorana neutrino-mass mechanism. With this notion, we derive for the inverted neutrino-mass hierarchy the allowed ranges of the half-lives of the 0νββ-decay for nuclei of experimental interest with different sets of nuclear matrix elements. The present-day results of the calculation of the 0νββ-decay nuclear matrix elements are briefly discussed. We argue that if 0νββ-decay will be observed in future experiments sensitive to the effective Majorana mass in the inverted mass hierarchy region, then a comparison of the derived ranges with measured half-lives will allow us to probe the standard seesaw mechanism assuming that future cosmological data will establish the sum of the neutrino masses to be about 0.2 eV.