POPULAR SUMMARY When ionizing radiation interacts with xenon, copious amounts of ultraviolet light are emitted at particular wavelengths—an “electroluminescence” that is leveraged in dark matter searches and neutrino detectors. But researchers were not aware of the presence of another, fainter, light emission over a broader wavelength range, from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Therefore, scientists expla...
The Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC (NEXT) searches for the neutrinoless double-beta (0 ) decay of 136Xe using high-pressure xenon gas TPCs with electroluminescent amplification. A scaled-up version of this technology with about 1 tonne of enriched xenon could reach in less than 5 years of operation a sensitivity to the half-life of 0 decay better than 1027 years, improving the current limits by at least o...
Submitted to JHEP; Next-generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiments aim for half-life sensitivities of ~$10^{27}$ yr, requiring suppressing backgrounds to <1 count/tonne/yr. For this, any extra background rejection handle, beyond excellent energy resolution and the use of extremely radiopure materials, is of utmost importance. The NEXT experiment exploits differences in the spatial ionization patterns...
High pressure xenon Time Projection Chambers (TPC) based on secondary scintillation (electroluminescence) signal amplification are being proposed for rare event detection such as directional dark matter, double electron capture and double beta decay detection. The discrimination of the rare event through the topological signature of primary ionisation trails is a major asset for this type of TPC when compared t...
The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment aims to detect rare low-energy interactions from Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The radiogenic backgrounds in the LUX detector have been measured and compared with Monte Carlo simulation. Measurements of LUX high-energy data have provided direct constraints on all background sources contributing to the background model. The expected backgro...