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The Hunt for neutrinoless double beta decay with the NEXT experiment

Instrumentation and Detectors 2019-08-13 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment Nuclear Experiment

Abstract

The NEXT-100 detector will search for the neutrinoless double beta decay of 136^{136}Xe using an electroluminescent high-pressure xenon gas TPC filled with 100 kg of enriched Xe. An observation of this hypothetical process would establish a Majorana nature for the neutrino and prove the violation of lepton number. A scaled-down prototype, NEXT-DEMO, has been built to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology. NEXT-DEMO includes an energy plane made of PMTs and a tracking plane made of SiPMs. X-ray energy depositions, produced by the de-excitation of xenon atoms after their interaction with gamma rays, have been used to characterize the detector response. With this method, the released energy by gammas coming from 22^{22}Na source has been corrected, achieving an energy resolution of 5.691% FWHM and 1.62% FWHM at the 29.7 keV and 511 keV peaks respectively, which extrapolate to 0.62% FWHM and 0.73% FWHM at Qββ_{\beta \beta} value of Xenon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.0475,
  title  = {The Hunt for neutrinoless double beta decay with the NEXT experiment},
  author = {D. Lorca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.0475},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Proceedings for the 20th Particles and Nuclei International Conference 2014