Searching for New Physics in Two-Neutrino Double Beta Decay.

Motivated by nonzero neutrino masses and the possibility of new physics discovery, a number of experiments search for neutrinoless double beta decay. While hunting for this hypothetical nuclear process, a significant amount of two-neutrino double beta decay data have become available. Although these events are regarded and studied mostly as the background of neutrinoless double beta decay, they can also be used to probe physics beyond the standard model. In this Letter, we show how the presence of right-handed leptonic currents would affect the energy distribution and angular correlation of the outgoing electrons in two-neutrino double beta decay. Consequently, we estimate constraints imposed by currently available data on the existence of right-handed neutrino interactions without having to assume their nature. In this way, our results complement the bounds coming from the nonobservation of neutrinoless double beta decay as they limit also the exotic interactions of Dirac neutrinos. We perform a detailed calculation of two-neutrino double beta decay under the presence of exotic (axial-) vector currents, and we demonstrate that current experimental searches can be competitive to existing limits.

Neutrinoless Double-ß Decay with Nonstandard Majoron Emission.

We present a novel mode of neutrinoless double-ß decay with emission of a light Majoron-like scalar particle ϕ. We assume it couples via an effective seven-dimensional operator with a (V+A) lepton current and (V±A) quark currents leading to a long-range contribution that is unsuppressed by the light neutrino mass. We calculate the total double-ß decay rate and determine the fully differential shape for this mode. We find that future double-ß decay searches are sensitive to scales of the order Λ_{NP}≈1 TeV for the effective operator and a light scalar m_{ϕ}<0.2 MeV, based on ordinary double-ß decay Majoron searches. The angular and energy distributions can deviate considerably from that of two-neutrino double-ß decay, which is the main background. We point out possible ultraviolet completions where such an effective operator can emerge.

Falsifying high-scale leptogenesis at the LHC.

Measuring a nonzero value for the cross section of any lepton number violating (LNV) process would put a strong lower limit on the washout factor for the effective lepton number density in the early Universe at times close to the electroweak phase transition and thus would lead to important constraints on any high-scale model for the generation of the observed baryon asymmetry based on LNV. In particular, for leptogenesis (LG) models with masses of the right-handed neutrinos heavier than the mass scale observed at the LHC, the implied large washout factors would lead to a violation of the out-of-equilibrium condition and exponentially suppress the net lepton number produced in such LG models. We thus demonstrate that the observation of LNV processes at the LHC results in the falsification of high-scale LG models. However, no conclusions about the viability of LG models can be drawn from the nonobservation of LNV processes.