Shell Model Analysis of the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of ⁴⁸Ca

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The neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay process could provide crucial information to determine the absolute scale of the neutrino masses, and it is the only one that can establish whether neutrino is a Dirac or a Majorana particle. A key ingredient for extracting the absolute neutrino masses from 0νββ decay experiments is a precise knowledge of the nuclear matrix elements (NME) describing the half-life of this process. We developed a new shell model approach for computing the 0νββ decay NME, and we used it to analyze the 0νββ mode of ⁴⁸Ca. The dependence of the NME on the short range correlations parameters, on the average energy of the intermediate states, on the finite-size cutoff parameters, and on the effective interaction used for the many-body calculations is discussed.