Results and Status of EXO

by Liang Yang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Wednesday 20 Jun 2012, 17:45 → 19:15 Europe/Berlin

Main Auditorium (Institute for Advanced studies)

The Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO) is an experimental program designed to search for the neutrino-less double beta decay of Xe-136. The current phase of the experiment, EXO-200, uses 200 kg of liquid xenon with 80% enrichment in Xe-136, and also serves as a prototype for a future 1-10 ton scale EXO experiment.  The detector has been taking low background physics data with enriched xenon at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico since early May 2011.  After reporting the first observation of two-neutrino double beta decay of Xe-136 in fall 2011, the collaboration has completed several detector upgrades and fine tuned detector performance for the search of neutrinoless double beta decay. We now report the first search result with an exposure of 32.5 kg-yr.  The achieved background limit and implication of the result to neutrino mass measurements will be discussed in the talk.  The recent R&D progress and design for next phase tonne scale xenon double beta decay experiment will also be reported.