Speaker
Description
Our group in the nEXO collaboration is developing a cryogenic method for Ba daughter tagging in neutrinoless double beta decay in liquid 136Xe. The principle is to capture the Ba daughter from liquid xenon by trapping it in a solid xenon layer on a cryogenic probe window and then scanning the layer with a laser for 1 Ba atom/ion or 0 Ba atom/ion. We can now image single Ba atoms in a solid xenon layer and have made progress toward single Ba+ ion images. We have discovered much about the physics/chemistry of Ba atoms and Ba+ ions in solid xenon and the deposition of thin and thick solid xenon layers, but there is much still to learn in order to perfect the imaging method. I will present these results and our parallel work to date towards grabbing and detecting Ba+ ions from a liquid xenon cell.
