Recording at: https://mediaspace.carleton.ca/media/Ion-taggingA+the+future+of+neutrin…
Ion-tagging: the future of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments
Even 65 years after the discovery of the neutrino, there remain many unknowns surrounding these elusive particles. Are they Dirac or Majorana fermions? What is their mass ordering? What is their absolute mass scale? Neutrinoless double beta decay searches are sensitive probes aiming to answer these questions. Combined with neutrino oscillation measurements, they constrain the nature of neutrinos and search for physics beyond the Standard Model.
The upcoming generation of Xe-136 experiments will probe to a Majorana mass at the 100 meV level using tonne scale detectors. This should cover the inverted hierarchy of neutrino masses and set a lower limit on the decay half-life above 1028 years. Yet, if still no neutrinoless decays are observed, what comes next? I will explore what a subsequent generation of experiments may look like, how they may be realized, and what challenges they may face. In this future, ion-tagging may be the key to reach the sensitivity necessary to probe the normal ordering of the neutrino mass hierarchy.
Bio
Robert Collister received his PhD from the University of Manitoba, working on the FranciumPNC experiment at TRIUMF. His first postdoc was at CERN with the ALPHA experiment, demonstrating laser cooling of antihydrogen. Currently, he's a postdoc at Carleton, working on barium tagging for nEXO.