Neutrinoless double beta decay

Some questions to guide you

  • What is the importance of the dicovery of neutrinoless double beta decay?
  • What does it mean to be a Majorana particle, and why is only the neutrino a candidate for being Majorana?
  • What is the connection between the 0bb decay experiments and the mass hierarchy of neutrinos?
  • What is the connection with lepton number violation?
  • Why can only few isotopes possibly exhibit 0bb decay and why?
  • What are the main experimental challenges in the experimental detection?
  • What are the main technology choices ?

     
General reference material:

  1. General Introductions to the physics of Majorana fermions:
    http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3320
    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.07512v2.pdf
  2. Experimental Overviews:
    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00631v2.pdf
    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4692v2.pdf

See also the links to general neutrino reviews on the Neutrino oscillations and mixing page of this course.


Recent Experiments (not exhaustive):

SuperNEMO expriment in Frejus/Modane:
Physics TDR: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s5en9xeqlyrco86/SuperNEMO_art%253A10.1140%252Fepjc%252Fs10052-010-1481-5.pdf?dl=0
Detector TDR: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1c6vghgqmjdz97z/supernemoproposal.pdf?dl=0
SuperNEMO Website: http://nemo.in2p3.fr/nemow3/publications.html

EXO-200 in new Mexico:
Detector TDR:https://www.dropbox.com/s/i18r8005euym2wb/EXO200TDR.pdf?dl=0 
EXO-200 website: https://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/exo/default.htm