Seminars and Journal Clubs

Sterile neutrinos and neutrinoless double beta decay in effective field theory

by Guanghui Zhou

Europe/Brussels
Description

We investigate neutrinoless double beta decay in the presence of sterile neutrinos with Majorana mass terms. These gauge-singlet fields are allowed to interact with SM fields via Yukawa couplings as well as higher-dimensional gauge-invariant operators up to dimension seven. We evolve these interactions to EW scale, and GeV scale and then use Chiral effective field theory to describe those interactions in terms of pions and nucleons. Finally, we derive an expression for neutrinoless double beta decay rate in terms of phase-space factors, hadronic low-energy constants, nuclear matrix elements, and Wilson coefficients of higher-dimensional operators. We find that next-generation experiments can probe BSM interactions up to scales of 100 TeV.