Improved discrimination for neutrinoless double beta decay searches with EXO-200 and nEXO
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Neutrinos have been shown to have non-zero mass, however how they generate their minuscule masses is an open question. One well motivated possibility is that neutrinos have Majorana masses, for which the most sensitive test is the observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay. The half-life of this neutrinoless mode is much slower than that of the observed two-neutrino mode of double-beta decay, which is many orders longer than the age of the universe, thus searches are heavily background dominated. In this work discusses two, completely distinct, methods to improve discrimination of neutrinoless double-beta decay, of xenon-136, from backgrounds. The first method is through training new discriminators to more fully exploit the observed topological information in EXO-200 to distinguish neutrinoless double-beta decay from the most common backgrounds. The second method is to enable the observation of barium-136 resulting from double-beta decay for a future generation detector via a hardware-centric approach. One path requires extraction from high pressure gas to vacuum of heavy ions from similarly heavy medium with high efficiency. Work on a prototype extraction apparatus for the nEXO collaboration and lessons learned are presented here.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Fudenberg, Daniel | |
|---|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Physics. | |
| Primary advisor | Gratta, Giorgio | |
| Thesis advisor | Gratta, Giorgio | |
| Thesis advisor | Akerib, Daniel S | |
| Thesis advisor | Tompkins, Lauren Alexandra | |
| Advisor | Akerib, Daniel S | |
| Advisor | Tompkins, Lauren Alexandra |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daniel Fudenberg. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Physics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Daniel Ryan Fudenberg
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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