Radiative corrections to double-β decay and their impact on experimental analyses
Abstract
We present a comprehensive study of the 𝒪(α) radiative corrections to two-neutrino and neutrinoless double-β decay within a heavy-nucleus effective field theory. We compute all virtual and real-emission corrections for intermediate nuclear states of arbitrary excitation energy, including new closed-form expressions for the required one-loop integrals with heavy-nucleus propagators. For excitation energies large compared with the lepton energies, the corrections factorize into the tree-level rate times a universal double-weak Sirlin function, which differs substantially from the sum of two single-β Sirlin functions used so far in the literature. We discuss the impact of the radiative corrections on the analysis of measured spectra in terms of ratios of nuclear matrix elements, ξ31, and show that neglecting radiative corrections can significantly bias the extraction. Real-photon emission, not considered in previous analyses, plays a central role and the impact of radiative corrections depends crucially on the detector setup. We provide the photon spectrum, fully differential in the photon energy and direction, and recommend that experiments simulate the photon explicitly. For 0νββ decay, the radiative corrections increase the inclusive rate by about 5%, independently of the nuclear matrix elements or the neutrino Majorana mass.
Related
- Radiative Corrections and Reheating in Supergravity Models of Inflation
- Radiative corrections to weak interaction processes
- Looking at radiative corrections to the Σ±→Λe± ν̅ semileptonic decay-rate ratio
- Δ resonance contributions to QED radiative corrections in neutron and inverse beta decay
- Radiative Corrections to the Direct Detection of Inelastic Scattering of Higgsino-like Neutralino Dark Matter
BibTeX
@misc{vries2026radiative,
title = {{Radiative corrections to double-$β$ decay and their impact on experimental analyses}},
author = {Jordy de Vries and Emanuele Mereghetti and Saad el Morabit and Stefan Sandner},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.28742},
eprint = {2610.28742},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28742},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Radiative corrections to double-β decay and their impact on experimental analyses
AU - Jordy de Vries
AU - Emanuele Mereghetti
AU - Saad el Morabit
AU - Stefan Sandner
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.28742
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28742
AB - We present a comprehensive study of the 𝒪(α) radiative corrections to two-neutrino and neutrinoless double-β decay within a heavy-nucleus effective field theory. We compute all virtual and real-emission corrections for intermediate nuclear states of arbitrary excitation energy, including new closed-form expressions for the required one-loop integrals with heavy-nucleus propagators. For excitation energies large compared with the lepton energies, the corrections factorize into the tree-level rate times a universal double-weak Sirlin function, which differs substantially from the sum of two single-β Sirlin functions used so far in the literature. We discuss the impact of the radiative corrections on the analysis of measured spectra in terms of ratios of nuclear matrix elements, ξ_31, and show that neglecting radiative corrections can significantly bias the extraction. Real-photon emission, not considered in previous analyses, plays a central role and the impact of radiative corrections depends crucially on the detector setup. We provide the photon spectrum, fully differential in the photon energy and direction, and recommend that experiments simulate the photon explicitly. For 0νββ decay, the radiative corrections increase the inclusive rate by about 5%, independently of the nuclear matrix elements or the neutrino Majorana mass.
ER -