Constraining the axion mass from the nonobservation of 0 ν β β decay

Abstract

In this paper, we study the interaction of neutrinos with nonrelativistic axions. Axions are low-mass neutral bosons whose existence has been proposed long ago by Peccei and Quinn to explain the spontaneous breaking of the CP symmetry in the early Universe. We treat them as pseudoscalar particles, which could be one of the constituents of cold DM. The interactions between axions and neutrinos might be a possible mechanism to explain for nonzero neutrino masses. Here on, we present an analysis which combines the limits for the neutrino masses extracted from the nonobservation of the neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay with the ones corresponding to the coupling between axions and neutrinos. We begin by defining the neutrino-axion interactions, then we extract the values of both the axion and neutrino masses by taking from the literature representative values of the strength of the couplings and of the matrix elements of the operators participating in the currents.