2014/11/03 by D. Lorca, Lorca, D.
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1411.0475
openalex publication_date 2014/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The NEXT-100 detector will search for the neutrinoless double beta decay of 136Xe using an electroluminescent high-pressure xenon gas TPC filled with 100 kg of enriched Xe. An observation of this hypothetical process would establish a Majorana nature for the neutrino and prove the violation of lepton number. A scaled-down prototype, NEXT-DEMO, has been built to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology. NEXT-DEMO includes an energy plane made of PMTs and a tracking plane made of SiPMs. X-ray energy depositions, produced by the de-excitation of xenon atoms after their interaction with gamma rays, have been used to characterize the detector response. With this method, the released energy by gammas coming from 22Na source has been corrected, achieving an energy resolution of 5.691% FWHM and 1.62% FWHM at the 29.7 keV and 511 keV peaks respectively, which extrapolate to 0.62% FWHM and 0.73% FWHM at Qββ value of Xenon.