Few active mechanisms of the neutrinoless double beta-decay and effective mass of Majorana neutrinos

Abstract

It is well known that there exist many mechanisms that may contribute to neutrinoless double beta decay (0nbb-decay). By exploiting the fact that the associated nuclear matrix elements are target dependent we show that, given definite experimental results on a sufficient number of targets, one can determine or sufficiently constrain all lepton violating parameters including the mass term. As a specific example we show that, assuming the observation of the 0nbb-decay in three different nuclei, e.g., 76Ge, 100Mo and 130Te, and just three lepton number violating mechanisms (light and heavy neutrino mass mechanisms as well as R-parity breaking SUSY mechanism) being active, there are only four different solutions for the lepton violating parameters, provided that they are relatively real. In particular, assuming evidence of the 0nbb-decay of 76Ge, the effective neutrino Majorana mass |m_bb| can be almost uniquely extracted by utilizing other existing constraints (cosmological observations and tritium beta-decay experiments). We also point out the possibility that the non-observation of the 0nbb-decay for some isotopes could be in agreement with a value of |m_bb| in sub eV region. We thus suggest that it is important to have at least two different 0nbb-decay experiments for a given nucleus.