The NEXT experiment for neutrinoless double beta decay searches

Abstract

The Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC (NEXT) seeks to discover the neutrinoless double beta ($\beta \beta 0\nu$) decay of ${}^{136}$Xe using a high-pressure xenon gas time projection chamber with electroluminescent amplification. The observation of $\beta \beta 0\nu$ decay would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles and that lepton number is not conserved. The NEXT detector concept offers several features of great value for $\beta \beta 0\nu$-decay searches, including excellent energy resolution, tracking for the active suppression of backgrounds and scalability to large source masses. The initial phase of the NEXT project (2009-2014) was devoted to R&D with two prototypes (DEMO and DBDM) of approximately 1 kg of active xenon mass that demonstrated the performance of the detector concept. During the second phase of the project (2015-2019), the NEXT Collaboration has operated underground at the Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc, in Spain, a radio-pure detector of about 5 kg of xenon mass. The goal of the current phase is the construction, commissioning and operation of the NEXT-100 detector, with a predicted sensitivity to the $\beta \beta 0\nu$ decay half-life of $6\times 10^{25}$ years (90% CL) after a run of 3 years. The Collaboration is planning as well a future tonne-scale phase to explore $\beta \beta 0\nu$-decay half-lives beyond $10^{26}$ years.

arXiv commentContribution to the proceedings of the 31st Rencontres de Blois

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Demonstration of background rejection using deep convolutional neural networks in the NEXT experiment
• Demonstration of the event identification capabilities of the NEXT-White detector
• Sensitivity of a tonne-scale NEXT detector for neutrinoless double beta decay searches
• Boosting background suppression in the NEXT experiment through Richardson-Lucy deconvolution
• Application and performance of an ML-EM algorithm in NEXT
• Measurement of radon-induced backgrounds in the NEXT double beta decay experiment