The Majorana Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay Program
COFFEE_KLATCH · Invited
Abstract
Neutrinoless double-beta decay searches play a major role in determining the nature of neutrinos, the existence of a lepton violating process, and the effective Majorana neutrino mass. The {\sc Majorana} Collaboration is assembling an array of high purity Ge detectors to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay in $^{76}$Ge. The {\sc Majorana} {\sc Demonstrator}, containing 40 kg (30 kg enriched in $^{76}$Ge) of Ge detectors, is currently being constructed and commissioned at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The initial goals are to demonstrate the required background and scalability of a Ge-based, tonne-scale experiment. The status and potential physics reach of the {\sc Majorana} {\sc Demonstrator} experiment will be presented.
*We acknowledge support from the Office of Nuclear Physics in the DOE Office of Science, the Particle and Nuclear Astrophysics Program of the National Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.
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