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| Description | HE Seminar Speaker: Igor Ostrovskiy, Stanford Title: Recent Results from EXO Host: Svoboda Room: 285 Abstract: The EXO (Enriched Xenon Observatory) experiment is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. If discovered, such a process would constitute a violation of lepton number conservation and would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles. Moreover, the rate of this process depends on the effective Majorana mass, thus providing information on the absolute mass scale of neutrinos, as opposite to the neutrino oscillation experiments that only measure mass differences. The current iteration of the experiment, called EXO-200, uses a time projection chamber filled with ~100 kg of liquid xenon enriched in Xe-136 isotope. The detector was designed and constructed to provide extremely low levels of background radioactivity, and is operated half a mile underground at the WIPP facility close to Carlsbad, New Mexico. In August 2011, the EXO collaboration was the first to successfully measure the two-neutrino mode of the double beta decay of Xe-136, and in May 2012 placed a limit on the neutrinoless mode (T1/2 >1.6e25 years @90C.L.) In this talk I will describe the EXO-200 design, present its latest physics results, and give an outlook for the next generation of the experiment. |
| Date | Tue, January 22, 2013 |
| Time | 8:00am-9:00am PST |
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Access | Public |
| Created by | High-Energy Seminars |
| Updated | Wed, January 16, 2013 8:05am PST |
| Send Reminder | Yes - 1 day 8 hour 0 minutes before start |
