Speaker
Description
The NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) project is an international collaboration aimed at finding evidence of neutrinoless double beta decay in Xe-136, using a high-pressure gaseous time projection chamber with electroluminescence and optical read-out. After an initial phase of research and development, the team was able to run a small-scale experiment called NEXT-White, which took place from 2016 to 2021 at the Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc, an underground facility in the Spanish Pyrenees. This detector has proven the outstanding performances of the NEXT technology in terms of energy resolution (<1% FWHM at 2.6 MeV) and event topology reconstruction to identify signal and background events. The current phase of the project involves the construction and operation of a larger experiment, NEXT-100, which will employ 100 kg of xenon. The commissioning of this detector is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023. In this talk we will discuss the most recent results of the experiment and the plans to extend the technology towards the ton-scale for fully exploring the inverse hierarchy of neutrino masses.
