Speaker
Description
Neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) is a hypothetical nuclear process which, if observed, would have far-reaching implications in particle physics. Being a lepton number violating process, the observation of 0νββ is direct evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. In addition, it would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles, and contribute to the determination of the neutrino mass scale. nEXO is a proposed next-generation experiment that will search for 0νββ of 136Xe. nEXO plans to use a liquid xenon time projection chamber that employs 5 tonnes of xenon, isotopically enriched to 90% in Xe-136. Ionization electrons and scintillation photons will be detected by segmented anode tiles and silicon photomultipliers, respectively. These will enable event-by-event reconstruction of event energy, position, and topology which will be used in a multi-parameter analysis to search for 0νββ events. The projected sensitivity of nEXO to the Xe-136 0νββ half-life is 1.35×10^28 years after 10 years of data-taking. The nEXO project is being developed by a collaboration of 34 institutions from 9 countries. In this talk, an overview of nEXO will be presented followed by a description of the conceptual design.
Name of collaboration or list of co-authors
nEXO Collaboration
