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Importance of loop effects in probing lepton number violation

Lukáš Gráf1,2,*, Chandan Hati3,†, Ana Martín-Galán3,‡, and Oliver Scholer4,5,§

  • *Contact author: lukas.graf@nikhef.nl
  • †Contact author: chandan@ific.uv.es
  • ‡Contact author: ana.martin@ific.uv.es
  • §Contact author: scholer@berkeley.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 035031 – Published 24 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/j8y1-89p5

Abstract

The discovery of the lepton number violation would be a smoking gun signal for physics beyond the Standard Model, and its most sensitive probe is the search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ). Working in the framework of the Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), we show that one-loop effects can remarkably improve the tree-level bounds on the new physics scales for several dimension-7 operators. Using ultraviolet model examples, we then showcase the competition among 0νββ contributions induced by dimension-7 and loop-level dimension-5 SMEFT operators.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 035031– Published 24 February, 2026
  • Received 2 May 2025
  • Accepted 29 January 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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