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This seminar presentation by Giorgio Gratta from Stanford University explores the nEXO experiment and its role in the search for neutrino-less double beta decay. Delve into the fascinating world of neutrinos, the only neutral elementary fermions that have provided numerous scientific surprises. Learn how flavor oscillations reveal non-conservation of lepton flavor number and demonstrate finite neutrino masses that are remarkably smaller than other fermions by at least six orders of magnitude. Discover the fundamental questions being investigated: whether neutrinos share the same mass-generating mechanism as other elementary fermions, and if they're described by 4-component Dirac wavefunctions or 2-component Majorana ones. Explore how the hypothetical phenomenon of neutrino-less double-beta decay can probe the Majorana nature of neutrinos, the conservation of total lepton number, and potentially clarify the origins of mass in the neutrino sector. Understand the extreme experimental challenges involved in detecting half-lives exceeding 10^25 years (approximately 10^15 times the age of the Universe), and examine the nEXO experiment—a 5-tonne enriched Xenon detector with sensitivity reaching beyond 10^28 years, more than 100 times the current state of the art. The presentation also covers how nEXO derives from the successful EXO-200 detector built by a collaboration with significant SLAC-Stanford participation.
