Latest advances in barium tagging technology with the NEXT experiment

ORAL

Abstract

NEXT is an experimental program searching for neutrinoless double beta decay (0nuBB) using high-pressure gaseous time projection chamber technology with enriched xenon. The latest experiment in the program, NEXT-100, is currently being constructed at the Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc in the Spanish Pyrenees and will perform a competitive search for 0nuBB utilizing excellent topological reconstruction and energy measurement at 1% FWHM at 2.5 MeV. In order to reach sensitivities towards 1030 years in the 0nuBB half-life, which is several orders of magnitude higher than current best limits, future, larger, detectors will require new methods to reduce the backgrounds to negligible levels, the NEXT collaboration is actively working towards the development of novel technology to tag the barium daughter ion from the decay. If realized, this technique could enable a background-free 0nuBB search. This talk will present the latest advances in barium tagging being developed by the NEXT collaboration.

*This work was supported by the US Department of Energy under awards DE-SC0019054 and DE-SC0019223, the US National Science Foundation under award number NSF CHE 2004111 and the Robert A Welch Foundation under award number Y-2031-20200401 (University of Texas Arlington). FJS was supported by the DOE Nuclear Physics Traineeship Program award DE-SC0022359. The NEXT Collaboration also acknowledges support from the following agencies and institutions: the European Research Council (ERC) under Grant Agreement No. 951281-BOLD; the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) under Grant Agreement No. 957202-HIDDEN; the MCIN/AEI of Spain and ERDF A way of making Europe under grants RTI2018-095979 and PID2021-125475NB , the Severo Ochoa Program grant CEX2018-000867-S and the Ram'on y Cajal program grant RYC-2015-18820; the Generalitat Valenciana of Spain under grants PROMETEO/2021/087 and CIDEGENT/2019/049; the Department of Education of the Basque Government of Spain under the predoctoral training program non-doctoral research personnel; the Portuguese FCT under project UID/FIS/04559/2020 to fund the activities of LIBPhys-UC; the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) under grant 1223/21; the Pazy Foundation (Israel) under grants 310/22, 315/19 and 465; the US Department of Energy under contracts number DE-AC02-06CH11357 (Argonne National Laboratory), DE-AC02-07CH11359 (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), DE-FG02-13ER42020 (Texas A&M).

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Publication: - A Compact Dication Source for Ba2+ Tagging and Heavy Metal Ion Sensor Development (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01522)
- Ba2+ ion trapping by organic submonolayer: towards an ultra-low background neutrinoless double beta decay detector (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09099)
- The Dynamics of Ions on Phased Radio-frequency Carpets in High Pressure Gases and Application for Barium Tagging in Xenon Gas Time Projection Chambers (NIMA1039 (2022), 167000)
- Barium Selective Chemosensing by Diazacrown Ether Naphthalimide Turn-on Fluorophores for Single Ion Barium Tagging ( ACS Sens. 2021, 6, 1, 192–202 (2021))
- Fluorescent bicolour sensor for low-background neutrinoless double β decay experiments (Nature 583, 48-54 (2020))
- Towards a background-free neutrinoless double beta decay experiment based on a fluorescent bicolor sensor (arXiv:1909.02782)
- Barium Chemosensors with Dry-Phase Fluorescence for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay (Nature Scientific Reports 9, 15097 (2019))
- Demonstration of Single Barium Ion Sensitivity for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay using Single Molecule Fluorescence Imaging (Phys.Rev.Lett. 120 (2018) no.13, 132504)
- Mobility and Clustering of Barium Ions and Dications in High Pressure Xenon Gas (Physical Review A 97, 062509 (2018))
- Single Molecule Fluorescence Imaging for Barium Tagging in Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay (Journal of Instrumentation 11 (2016) no.12, P12011)

Presenters

  • Krishan Mistry

    • University of Texas at Arlington

Authors

  • Krishan Mistry

    • University of Texas at Arlington