The idea of double beta decay was first proposed by Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1935.
In 1937, Ettore Majorana demonstrated that all results of beta decay theory remain unchanged if the neutrino were its own antiparticle, now known as a Majorana particle.
In 1939, Wendell H. Furry proposed that if neutrinos are Majorana particles, then double beta decay can proceed without the emission of any neutrinos, via the process now called neutrinoless double beta decay.
It is not yet known whether the neutrino is a Majorana particle, and, relatedly, whether neutrinoless double beta decay exists in nature.
As parity violation in weak interactions would not be discovered until 1956, earlier calculations showed that neutrinoless double beta decay should be much more likely to occur than ordinary double beta decay, if neutrinos were Majorana particles. The predicted half-lives were on the order of ~ years. Efforts to observe the process in laboratory date back to at least 1948 when E.L. Fireman made the first attempt to directly measure the half-life of the  isotope with a Geiger counter.
Radiometric experiments through about 1960 produced negative results or false positives, not confirmed by later experiments. In 1950, for the first time the double beta decay half-life of  was measured by geochemical methods to be 1.4× years,
reasonably close to the modern value. This involved detecting the concentration in minerals of the xenon produced by the decay.
In 1956, after the V − A nature of weak interactions was established, it became clear that the half-life of neutrinoless double beta decay would significantly exceed that of ordinary double beta decay. Despite significant progress in experimental techniques in 1960–1970s, double beta decay was not observed in a laboratory until the 1980s. Experiments had only been able to establish the lower bound for the half-life – about  years. At the same time, geochemical experiments detected the double beta decay of  and .
Double beta decay was first observed in a laboratory in 1987 by the group of Michael Moe at UC Irvine in .
Since then, many experiments have observed ordinary double beta decay in other isotopes. None of those experiments have produced positive results for the neutrinoless process, raising the half-life lower bound to approximately  years. Geochemical experiments continued through the 1990s, producing positive results for several  isotopes. Double beta decay is the rarest known kind of radioactive decay; as of 2019 it has been observed in only 14 isotopes (including double electron capture in  observed in 2001,  observed in 2013, and  observed in 2019), and all have a mean lifetime over  yr (table below).