Friday 23 May, 11.00h, at the Nikhef Colloquium room
Speaker: Thomas Brunner (McGill University)
Title: “Searching for rare events to unravel the nature of the neutrino”
Abstract:
Neutrinos are the most abundant know particles with mass in our Universe. The discovery that they have mass suggests that the Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete. The fact that neutrinos are the only electrically neutral leptons opens the possibility that they may have properties that differ from all other fundamental spin-1/2 particles. In particular, it opens the possibility that neutrino and anti-neutrino are in fact the same particle, i.e., that they are Majorana particles. A promising approach to probe for the Majorana nature of the neutrino is to search for lepton-number violating neutrinoless double decay (0νββ). An observation of this decay would violate conservation of lepton number in weak interactions, and it could help explain the observed matter dominance in our Universe. For this reason, the search for 0νββ has been identified as high priority in national and international strategies.
Several collaborations worldwide are searching for 0νββ in different isotopes with various detector technologies, yet an observation is still outstanding. Current sensitivity limits on the half-life of this decay are on the order of 1025 to 1026 years. Next-generation experiments are being developed to aim for a sensitivity increase by 1 – 2 orders of magnitude. Xenon with its double-beta decaying isotope Xe-136 is an ideal candidate for such next-generation searches using time-projection chambers. I will present prospects of this search and argue for a united global effort, based of past developments of the nEXO experiment.
This colloquium will be hybrid: