Neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay of ${}^{124}$Sn, ${}^{130}$Te, and ${}^{136}$Xe in the Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method

Abstract

We present a generator-coordinate method for realistic shell-model Hamiltonians that closely approximates the full shell model calculations of the matrix elements for the neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay of ${}^{124}$Sn, ${}^{130}$Te, and ${}^{136}$Xe. We treat not only quadrupole deformations but also the proton-neutron pairing amplitudes as generator coordinates. We validate this method by calculating and comparing spectroscopic quantities with the exact shell model results and experimental data. Our Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method produces $0\nu \beta \beta$ matrix elements much closer to the shell model ones, compared to the existing energy-density-functional-based generator-coordinate approaches. The remaining overestimation of $0\nu \beta \beta$ nuclear matrix element suggests that additional correlations may be needed to be taken into account for ${}^{124}$Sn, ${}^{130}$Te, and ${}^{136}$Xe when calculating with the Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method. The validation of this method may open the possibility of calculating $0\nu \beta \beta$ matrix element of ${}^{150}$Nd in a large shell-model space.

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables