Neutrinoless double-beta decay: a nuclear window to neutrinos

by Dr Javier Menéndez (Technische Universität Darmstadt Institut für Kernphysik)

Tuesday 20 May 2014, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Rome

LAE meeting room (INFN-LNL)

Major experimental efforts are currently placed on searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a very rare nuclear decay mode only permitted if neutrinos are Majorana particles. In addition, knowing the nuclear matrix elements for this process will enable to extract from the measured decay lifetimes the absolute neutrino masses. I will give an overview of neutrinoless double-beta decay and discuss some of the  theoretical challenges faced by reliable nuclear matrix elements calculations. Finally I share some ideas on how nuclear structure experiments can provide guidance to the theoretical efforts.