Speaker
Description
Neutrinoless double beta decay experiments try to establish whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles by searching for an ultra-rare radioactive process with a half-life that may be longer than $10^{27}$ years. A discovery would have major implications for particle physics and cosmology, but requires tonne-scale detectors with backgrounds below 1 count per tonne per year. This poses a formidable technical challenge that has prompted a diverse and dynamic worldwide experimental effort. The NEXT Collaboration uses a high pressure xenon gas time projection chamber with electroluminescent amplification, which offers excellent energy resolution, particle tracking for background suppression and scalability to large source masses. While this approach is being validated on smaller scales, I will discuss the current prospects to reach the tonne-scale goal. A future tonne-scale detector will employ a barrel of wavelength-shifting fibres for light detection, whose efficacy is being investigated right now. Machine learning techniques can be used to improve background rejection. And finally, it will be augmented with single molecule fluorescent imaging detectors for barium tagging — to explore $0\nu\beta\beta$-decay half-lives up to $10^{28}$~years.
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