Status and physics potential of NEXT-100

TL;DR

The NEXT-100 detector is a high-pressure xenon gas TPC designed to search for neutrinoless double beta decay with excellent energy resolution and background discrimination, aiming to explore the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy.

Contribution

This paper reports on the status and physics potential of the NEXT-100 detector, highlighting its design features and future scalability for neutrino mass hierarchy exploration.

Findings

NEXT-100 will have better than 1% FWHM energy resolution at Q value.

The detector can distinguish signal from background using event topology.

The technique is scalable to ton-scale detectors for full hierarchy coverage.

Abstract

The NEXT-100 time projection chamber, currently under construction, will search for neutrinoless double beta decay (bb0nu) using 100-150 kg of high-pressure xenon gas enriched in the Xe-136 isotope to ~91%. The detector possesses two important features for bb0nu searches: very good energy resolution (better than 1% FWHM at the Q value of Xe-136) and event topological information for the distinction between signal and background. Furthermore, the technique can be extrapolated to the ton-scale, thus allowing the full exploration of the inverted hierarchy of neutrino masses.