[Triumf-seminars] TRIUMF Colloquium today at 13:00

[TRIUMF Seminars]

Date/Time: Tue 2016-10-18 at 13:00

Location:  Auditorium          

Speaker:   Ben Kay (Argonne National Laboratory)

Title:     The Microscopic Anatomy of Neutrinoless-Double-Beta-Decay Candidates

Abstract: A potential observation of neutrinoless double beta decay is one of the most exciting prospects in contemporary physics. It would inform us that neutrinos are Majorana in nature and that lepton-number conservation is violated, demanding a modification to the Standard Model. The lifetime of the decay process would yield information on the effective mass of the neutrino and thus an absolute mass scale for neutrinos. However, this requires knowledge of the nuclear matrix element, which relies on theoretical calculations. To date, there is a factor of 2-4 uncertainty between different calculations of the nuclear matrix element for any given isotope, which translates to as much as an order of magnitude in the half-life. Such discrepancies could have significant implications for the design of experiments searching for neutrinoless double beta decay. I will discuss a program of measurements over the last decade that have provided information on nuclear-structure properties of several candidate nuclei, namely the microscopic occupancies of valence orbitals and how they change in the decay. This information has been used to constrain calculations of the nuclear matrix elements. I will focus the discussion on 76Ge, 130Te, and 136Xe, three of the most promising candidates in the search for neutrinoless double beta decay. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract Number DE-AC02-06CH11357

Stimulants available 15 minutes before the talk.

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General TRIUMF seminar information available at http://www.triumf.ca/home/upcoming-events/about-seminars-lectures