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Abstract

We study neutrinoless double-beta decay in an effective field theory (EFT)
for heavy nuclei, which are treated as a spherical core coupled to additional
neutrons and/or protons. Since the low-energy constants of the EFT cannot be
fitted to data for this unobserved decay, we follow an alternative strategy to
constrain 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 therefore
first calculate the nuclear matrix elements for double Gamow-Teller transitions
in the EFT for heavy nuclei. The combination of the EFT uncertainty with the
correlation uncertainty enables predictions of nuclear matrix elements for
neutrinoless double-beta decay for a broad range of isotopes with quantified
uncertainties. Generally the EFT predicts smaller nuclear matrix elements
compared to other approaches, but our EFT results are consistent with recent ab
initio calculations.