Organized by: Prof. Lu Lu

Events on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Searching for double beta decay with the Enriched Xenon Observatory

Time: 4:00 pm

Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall

Speaker: Carter Hall, University of Maryland

Abstract: An observation of neutrinoless double beta decay would have profound consequences for our understanding of the lepton sector of the standard model. Double beta decay is only allowed if the neutrino and anti-neutrino are identical, which is a basic prediction of many extensions of the standard model, including many grand unified theories. Secondly, double beta decay could shed light on the scale of the neutrino mass spectrum. The EXO collaboration is developing sensitive searches for the double beta decay of Xenon-136. Our first experiment, EXO-200, is rapidly being constructed, and will be by far the largest double beta decay experiment ever attempted. We are also pursuing R&D to realize a system to tag the daughter barium nucleus of the decay using the techniques of single-ion spectroscopy. This would eliminate all conventional backgrounds, resulting in an ideal experiment.

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