Speaker
Dr
Thomas ODonnell
(UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)
Description
Neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) is theoretically motivated but has never been observed. Its discovery would demonstrate lepton number violation, establish neutrinos are Majorana fermions and possibly constrain the absolute neutrino-mass\
scale.
The last decade has seen tremendous experimental progress in the search for this decay but to push the frontier forward improved detectors combining excellent energy resolution, extremely low background, and ton-yr exposures are required.
CUORE and KamLAND-Zen are meeting this challenge in two very different ways; the former with $^{130}$Te in TeO$_{2}$ bolometers and the latter with $^{136}$Xe-loaded liquid scintillator. In this talk I will give a brief overview of both these experiments\
and their status. In particular I will present recent results from CUORE-0, a single-tower prototype of the CUORE experiment and describe the onging Phase-II of KamLAND-Zen.
Primary author
Dr
Thomas ODonnell
(UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)