Nuclear Structure Aspects of Neutrinoless Double-<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>β</mml:mi></mml:math>Decay

Abstract

We decompose the neutrinoless double-β decay matrix elements into sums of products over the intermediate nucleus with two less nucleons. We find that the sum is dominated by the J(π)=0(+) ground state of this intermediate nucleus for both the light and heavy neutrino decay processes. This provides a new theoretical tool for comparing and improving nuclear structure models. It also provides the connection to two-nucleon transfer experiments.