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Search for the Majorana Nature of Neutrinos in the Inverted Mass Ordering Region with KamLAND-Zen

S. Abe et al. (KamLAND-Zen Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 051801 – Published 30 January 2023
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Abstract

The KamLAND-Zen experiment has provided stringent constraints on the neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) decay half-life in Xe136 using a xenon-loaded liquid scintillator. We report an improved search using an upgraded detector with almost double the amount of xenon and an ultralow radioactivity container, corresponding to an exposure of 970 kg yr of Xe136. These new data provide valuable insight into backgrounds, especially from cosmic muon spallation of xenon, and have required the use of novel background rejection techniques. We obtain a lower limit for the 0νββ decay half-life of T1/20ν>2.3×1026yr at 90% C.L., corresponding to upper limits on the effective Majorana neutrino mass of 36–156 meV using commonly adopted nuclear matrix element calculations.

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  • Received 4 March 2022
  • Revised 10 April 2022
  • Accepted 29 November 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.051801

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

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Nuclear Physics

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Probing Majorana Neutrinos

Published 30 January 2023

Detecting neutrinoless double-beta decay would confirm that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Data from the KamLAND-Zen experiment contain no strong evidence of such events, constraining neutrino properties.

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See Also

KamNet: An integrated spatiotemporal deep neural network for rare event searches in KamLAND-Zen

A. Li, Z. Fu, C. Grant, H. Ozaki, I. Shimizu, H. Song, A. Takeuchi, and L. A. Winslow
Phys. Rev. C 107, 014323 (2023)

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Vol. 130, Iss. 5 — 3 February 2023

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