Neutrinoless double-beta decay from an effective field theory for heavy nuclei

We study neutrinoless double-beta decay in an effective field theory (EFT)for heavy nuclei, which are treated as a spherical core coupled to additionalneutrons and/or protons. Since the low-energy constants of the EFT cannot befitted to data for this unobserved decay, we follow an alternative strategy toconstrain these through a correlation with double Gamow-Teller transitions.This correlation was recently found to hold for shell-model calculations,energy-density functionals, and other nuclear structure models. We thereforefirst calculate the nuclear matrix elements for double Gamow-Teller transitionsin the EFT for heavy nuclei. The combination of the EFT uncertainty with thecorrelation uncertainty enables predictions of nuclear matrix elements forneutrinoless double-beta decay for a broad range of isotopes with quantifieduncertainties. Generally the EFT predicts smaller nuclear matrix elementscompared to other approaches, but our EFT results are consistent with recent abinitio calculations.