Related papers: Progress toward Barium Tagging in High Pressure Xe…
In the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, understanding and reducing backgrounds is crucial for success. An advance that could drive backgrounds to negligible levels would be the ability to efficiently detect the barium daughter in…
Background rejection is key to success for future neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. To achieve sensitivity to effective Majorana lifetimes of $\sim10^{28}$ years, backgrounds must be controlled to better than 0.1 count per ton per…
A new method to tag the barium daughter in the double beta decay of $^{136}$Xe is reported. Using the technique of single molecule fluorescent imaging (SMFI), individual barium dication (Ba$^{++}$) resolution at a transparent scanning…
The imaging of individual Ba$^{2+}$ ions in high pressure xenon gas is one possible way to attain background-free sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta decay and hence establish the Majorana nature of the neutrino. In this paper we…
The nature of the neutrino is one of the major open questions in experimental nuclear and particle physics. The most sensitive known method to establish the Majorana nature of the neutrino is detection of the ultra-rare process of…
The search for neutrinoless double beta decay probes the fundamental properties of neutrinos, including whether or not the neutrino and antineutrino are distinct. Double beta detectors are large and expensive, so background reduction is…
Single molecule fluorescence detection of barium is investigated for enhancing the sensitivity and robustness of a neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) search in $^{136}$Xe, the discovery of which would alter our understanding…
Progress on a method of barium tagging for the nEXO double beta decay experiment is reported. Absorption and emission spectra for deposits of barium atoms and ions in solid xenon matrices are presented. Excitation spectra for prominent…
Tagging barium ions in double beta decay experiments involving $^{136}$Xe offers a promising pathway to achieving an almost background-free environment, which is essential for addressing key unresolved questions in neutrino physics, such as…
We present a new neutrinoless double beta decay concept: the high pressure selenium hexafluoride gas time projection chamber. Combining techniques pioneered in high pressure xenon gas such as topological discrimination, with the high…
Neutrinoless double beta decay is one of the most sensitive probes for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. One of the isotopes under investigation is $^{136}$Xe, which would double beta decay into $^{136}$Ba.…
We present a tunable metal ion beam that delivers controllable ion currents in the picoamp range for testing of dry-phase ion sensors. Ion beams are formed by sequential atomic evaporation and single or multiple electron impact ionization,…
We describe a system to transport and identify barium ions produced in liquid xenon, as part of R&D towards the second phase of a double beta decay experiment, nEXO. The goal is to identify the Ba ion resulting from an extremely rare…
High pressure gas detectors offer advantages for the detection of rare events, where background reduction is crucial. For the neutrinoless double beta decay of 136Xe a high pressure xenon gas Time Projection Chamber (TPC) combines a good…
NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) is an experiment to search neutrinoless double beta decay processes (bb0nu) in Xe136. The NEXT technology is based in the use of time projection chambers operating at a typical pressure of 15 bar…
The NEXT experiment aims to observe the neutrinoless double beta decay of xenon in a high-pressure Xe136 gas TPC using electroluminescence (EL) to amplify the signal from ionization. One of the main advantages of this technology is the…
This article reviews the application of high pressure gas xenon (HPXe) time projection chambers to neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. First, the fundamentals of the technology and the historical development of the field are…
Radio-frequency (RF) carpets with ultra-fine pitches are examined for ion transport in gases at atmospheric pressures and above. We develop new analytic and computational methods for modeling RF ion transport at densities where dynamics are…
Several efforts are ongoing for the development of spherical gaseous time projection chamber detectors for the observation of rare phenomena such as weakly interacting massive particles or neutrino interactions. The proposed detector,…
The clustering and drift properties of barium ions in xenon gas are explored theoretically, using density functional theory and computational ion mobility theory, with the goal of better understanding barium ion transport for neutrinoless…