Neutrinoless double-β decay of 124 Sn, 130 Te, and 136 Xe in the Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method
We present a generator-coordinate method for realistic shell-model Hamiltonians that closely approximates the full shell model calculations of the matrix elements for the neutrinoless double-β decay of 124 Sn, 130 Te, and 136 Xe. Here, we treat not only quadrupole deformations but also the proton-neutron pairing amplitudes as generator coordinates. We validate this method by calculating and comparing spectroscopic quantities with the exact shell model results and experimental data. Our Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method produces 0νββ matrix elements much closer to the shell model ones, compared to the existing energy-density-functional-based generator-coordinate approaches. The remaining overestimation of 0νββ nuclear matrix element suggests that additional correlations may be needed to be taken into account for 124 Sn, 130 Te, and 136 Xe when calculating with the Hamiltonian-based generator-coordinate method. The validation of this method may open the possibility of calculating 0νββ matrix element of 150 Nd in a large shell-model space.