Drexel University

 

Tiny, weakly interacting neutrinos are extremely difficult to study in the laboratory, but studying neutrinos can give us a better understanding of the origin and structure of the universe. The discovery of neutrino mass is direct evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. It is an experimentally open question whether neutrinos have distinct antiparticles, and the answer is directly related to the origin of neutrino mass. The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay, a non-Standard Model version of a rare nuclear process, would prove that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. EXO-200 and nEXO are part of a program to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. I will report on the results from the EXO-200 experiment, which ran from 2011 to 2018 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM. I will also discuss progress toward nEXO, a next generation experiment that will increase sensitivity by over two orders of magnitude.