Speaker
Description
nEXO is a proposed next-generation liquid xenon experiment to search for neutrino-less double beta decay (0νββ) of $^{136}$Xe. The experiment will use a 5-tonne liquid xenon (LXe) monolithic time projection chamber (TPC) with xenon enriched to 90% the isotope 136. While the nEXO design is validated by EXO-200, the larger detector will employ novel techniques to collect charge and scintillation light, and employ ASIC electronics installed directly in the LXe, only transmitting out digitized signals. Ionization electrons and scintillation photons from energy deposits in the detector will be recorded by a segmented anode and a large area SiPM array.
This talk will present recent progress in the detector design and prototyping, and an improved modelling of the readout system and analysis. New simulations result in a 90% CL 0νββ halflife sensitivity of 1.35×10$^{28}$yrs in 10 years of data taking and a Majorana mass reach that, for most models, entirely covers the inverted hierarchy.
