Neutrinoless double beta decay rates in the presence of light sterile neutrinos

Abstract

We investigate neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu \beta \beta$) in minimal extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics where gauge-singlet right-handed neutrinos give rise to Dirac and Majorana neutrino mass terms. We argue that the standard treatment of these scenarios, based on mass-dependent nuclear matrix elements, is missing important contributions to the $0\nu \beta \beta$ amplitude. First, new effects arise from the exchange of neutrinos with very small (ultrasoft) momenta, for which we compute the associated nuclear matrix elements for the decays of ${}^{76}$Ge and ${}^{136}$Xe. These contributions can dominate the $0\nu \beta \beta$ rate in cases with light sterile neutrinos. The ultrasoft terms are also relevant in the more standard scenario of just three light Majorana neutrinos where they lead to a $10\%$ reduction of the total $0\nu \beta \beta$ amplitude. Secondly, we highlight the importance of short-range terms associated with medium-heavy sterile neutrinos and provide explicit formulae that can be used in phenomenological analyses. As examples we discuss impact of these new effects in several explicit scenarios, including a realistic $3+2$ model with two right-handed gauge-singlet neutrinos.

Comments: v2 corresponds to the published version; added user-friendly Mathematica NB for computation of lifetimes for ${}^{76}$Ge and ${}^{136}$Xe