Orateur
Description
Neutrinoless double beta decay is a hypothetical rare process that
violates lepton number conservation and implies the Majorana nature of
neutrinos, which could also give insight into their absolute mass
scale. The NEXT collaboration searches for such decay with Xe-136,
exploiting high-pressure xenon gas TPCs with electroluminescent
amplification. The principal trademarks of the experiment include an
excellent energy resolution at the Qbb (<1% FWHM), as well as a highly
defined topology reconstruction of events, that boosts the
signal-over-background discrimination. Once the data-taking period of
the NEXT-White demonstrator has ended, its latest results are
presented here. Apart from that, the status of NEXT-100 and prospects
for ton-scale and beyond R&D comprise an important part of the talk.
