Colloquium Friday Feb 23, 2018, 2 pm: “Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay and Lattice QCD,” Dr. Evan Berkowitz, Forschungszentrum Jülich

Experiments both planned and under way hunt for an exotic nuclear decay where two protons decay into two neutrons, two electrons, and no neutrinos.  Such a spectacular decay would ensure neutrinos are Majorana fermions, that lepton number was not fundamental, and would reveal new potential sources of CP violation.

 

However, understanding the results of these searches as constraints on underlying particle physics requires connecting phenomena separated by many orders of magnitude in energy.  In particular, good understanding of nuclear effects is important for disentangling new physics from known strong-interaction physics.  I will detail lattice QCD results for relevant matrix elements and the role these matrix elements play in bridging the divide between experimental results and new physics constraints.