Empirical inference on the Majorana mass of the ordinary neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that current cosmological data can precisely constrain the effective Majorana mass of neutrinos, providing a new avenue for understanding neutrino properties despite experimental challenges.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical method to extract neutrino Majorana mass constraints from cosmological measurements, enhancing the link between cosmology and neutrino physics.

Findings

Cosmological data tightly constrain the effective Majorana mass.

Analytical procedures can accurately reproduce numerical results.

Implications for neutrinoless double beta decay are discussed.

Abstract

There is a broad theoretical consensus on the idea that ordinary neutrinos have a Majorana mass, but we have no clear prediction about its value, and direct experimental measurements of this quantity are rather challenging. In this work, we argue that the current cosmological measurements allow us to obtain precise information on the effective Majorana mass, i.e. the electronic-type mass of ordinary neutrinos. We show that the numerical results that we obtain can be accurately reproduced, and hence tested, by a straightforward analytical procedure. We then discuss the stability of the assumptions at the basis of our analysis and the implications of our findings for neutrinoless double beta decay.