Abstract
Tremendous efforts are required to scale the summit of observing neutrinoless double beta decay (). This article quantitatively explores the interplay between exposure (target taking time) and background levels in experiments. In particular, background reduction can substantially alleviate the necessity of unrealistic large exposure as the normal mass hierarchy (NH) is probed. The nondegenerate (ND)-NH can be covered with an exposure of ton-year, which is only an order of magnitude larger than those planned for next-generation projects—provided that the background could be reduced by relative to the current best levels. It follows that background suppression will be playing increasingly important and investment-effective, if not determining, roles in future experiments with sensitivity goals of approaching and covering ND-NH.
2 More- Received 27 August 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.101.013006
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society