Search for 0νββ decay with EXO

by Dr Dr. Guofu Cao（Institute of High Energy Physics，CAS）

Thursday 17 Dec 2020, 10:00 → 11:30 Asia/Shanghai

https://zoom.com.cn/j/93162018015 (id: 93162018015 password: 299308）

Abstract：

The neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) is a rare nuclear process that only occurs if neutrino is its own antiparticle, known as Majorana particle. The observation of 0νββ would not only demonstrate the violation of lepton number and confirm the Majorana nature of neutrino, but also provide the information on neutrino mass.

The main task of the EXO project is to search for 0νββ of 136-Xe by using an enriched liquid xenon TPC. EXO-200 is the first stage of the EXO project, which is a 100 kg-class 0νββ experiment and decommissioned in 2018. EXO-200 achieved the half-life sensitivity of 5.0*10^25 yr at the 90% confidence level based on combined Phase I and Phase II data. nEXO is a proposed next generation 0νββ experiment, using 5 tonnes of isotopically enriched liquid 136-Xe. Due to the same detection techniques, nEXO will greatly benefit from the successful experience of EXO-200. The predicted half-life sensitivity of nEXO is about 10^28 yr, which entirely covers the entire parameter space of inverted neutrino mass hierarchy.

In this talk, I will briefly summarize the results achieved by EXO-200 and physics potential in nEXO, then mainly focus on the latest R&D progresses in nEXO.

 

Biography：

Guofu Cao is associate researcher at Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), CAS. He was awarded his PhD degree in 2009 for development of detector simulation software for BESIII experiment. From 2009 to 2011, his efforts were made to improve the BESIII simulation performance as a postdoc at IHEP and to develop the first simulation software for the Belle II project as a visiting scholar at KEK.

From 2011, he has been joined the Daya Bay experiment as co-L3 manager of simulation group and coordinates all relavent activities. In 2014, he joined EXO project and was a visiting scholar at Stanford university. He was appointed to co-L2 manager of photodetector system in 2015. Since then, a large fraction of his time has been devoted to coordinate photodetetor R&D activities in nEXO. Now, besides nEXO, he is also working on detetor simulation of JUNO and coordinating activities related to SiPM and readout system in TAO detector.