Search for Majorana neutrinos with the first two years of EXO-200 data
The EXO-200 experiment is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. If discovered, such a process would constitute a violation of lepton number conservation and would prove that neutrinos are Majorana particles. Moreover, the rate of this process depends on the effective Majorana mass, thus providing information on the absolute mass scale of neutrinos.
EXO-200 uses a time projection chamber filled with O(100) kg of liquid xenon enriched in Xe-136 isotope. The detector was designed and constructed to provide extremely low levels of background radioactivity, and is operated half a mile underground at the WIPP facility close to Carlsbad, New Mexico. In this talk I will describe the EXO-200 design, present its latest physics results based on 99.8 kr*yr of Xe-136 exposure, and give an outlook for the next generation of the experiment.