Speaker
Description
Observation of the neutrinoless double-beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay, a process forbidden in the Standard Model, would demonstrate lepton number violation and provide key insights into matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe and the Majorana nature of neutrino. It is a challenging quest that requires experimental conditions ensuring little to no background, superb energy resolution, and high masses of studied isotopes. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless double-beta Decay (LEGEND) is designed to provide such experimental conditions, and will operate in virtually background free regime, aiming at unambiguous discovery of $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay of $^{76}$Ge.
The first stage of the experiment, LEGEND-200, utilizes up to 200 kg of $^{76}$Ge-enriched detectors, and is currently in operation. The second stage, LEGEND-1000, will employ 1000 kg of enriched germanium, and is projected to reach sensitivity to the half-life of $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay in excess of $10^{28}$ years, a big leap compared to previously achievable limits.
LEGEND-200 is located at LNGS, Italy, inheriting the existing GERDA facility. The commissioning of LEGEND-200 was completed in October 2022 with the deployment of 140 kg of enriched high-purity $^{76}$Ge detectors, and physics data taking started in March 2023. In this talk I will summarize the status of the experiment and its current and future milestones. The talk is presented on behalf of the LEGEND collaboration.
| Collaboration / Activity | LEGEND collaboration |
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