We treat proton-neutron pairing amplitudes, in addition to the nuclear deformation, as generator coordinates in a calculation of the neutrinoless double-beta decay of 76Ge. We work in two oscillator shells, with a Hamiltonian that includes separable
terms in the quadrupole, spin-isospin, and pairing (isovector and isoscalar) channels. Our approach allows larger single-particle spaces than the shell model and includes the important physics of the proton-neutron quasiparticle random-phase approximation (QRPA) without instabilities near phase transitions. After comparing the results of a simplified calculation that neglects deformation with those of the QRPA, we present a more realistic calculation with both deformation and proton-neutron pairing amplitudes as generator coordinates. The future should see proton-neutron coordinates used together with energy-density functionals.
We use Lee-Suzuki mappings and related techniques to construct effective two-body p-shell interactions and neutrinoless double-beta operators that exactly reproduce the results of large no-core-shell-model calculations of double-beta decay in nuclei
with mass number A=6. We then apply the effective operators to the decay of nuclei with A=7, 8, and 10, again comparing with no-core calculations in much larger spaces. The results with the effective two-body operators are generally good. In some cases, however, they differ non-negligibly from the full no-core results, suggesting that three-body corrections to the decay operator in heavier nuclei may be important. An application of our procedure and related ideas to fp-shell nuclei such as 76Ge should be feasible within coupled-cluster theory.
