Light Collection and Simulation for nEXO
ORAL
Abstract
nEXO is a next-generation 5-tonne liquid xenon time projection chamber that will search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of Xe-136. The experiment has a projected half-life sensitivity of 1.35 x 1028 years over 10 years of livetime, which sets a design goal of 0.8% energy resolution (σE/E) at the decay Q-value of 2.458 MeV. Achieving this goal requires optimizing the collection of scintillation photons from energy deposits in liquid xenon. To this end, nEXO will employ approximately 46,000 silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) positioned around the detector’s barrel to detect the vacuum ultra-violet, 175 nm scintillation light of liquid xenon. In this talk I will describe candidate SiPMs for nEXO and current efforts to simulate the light detection performance of the full detector and leverage the experiment’s high pixelation for photoimaging of events.
*The speaker gratefully acknowledges support for nEXO from the Office of Nuclear Physics within DOE’s Office of Science, and NSF in the United States; from NSERC, CFI, FRQNT, NRC, and the McDonald Institute (CFREF) in Canada; from IBS in Korea; and from CAS and NSFC in China. This work was supported in part by Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) programs at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-2139841.
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Presenters
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Molly Watts
- Yale University