Freitas, E. D. C., Monteiro, C. M. B., Ball, M., Gomez-Cadenas, J. J., Lopes, J. A. M., Lux, T., et al. (2010). Secondary scintillation yield in high-pressure xenon gas for neutrinoless double beta decay (0 nu beta beta) search. Phys. Lett. B, 684(4-5), 205–210.
Abstract: The search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0 nu beta beta) is an important topic in contemporary physics with many active experiments. New projects are planning to use high-pressure xenon gas as both source and detection medium. The secondary scintillation processes available in noble gases permit large amplification with negligible statistical fluctuations, offering the prospect of energy resolution approaching the Fano factor limit. This Letter reports results for xenon secondary scintillation yield, at room temperature, as a function of electric field in the gas scintillation gap for pressures ranging from 2 to 10 bar. A Large Area Avalanche Photodiode (LAAPD) collected the VUV secondary scintillation produced in the gas. X-rays directly absorbed in the LAAPD are used as a reference for determining the number of charge carriers produced by the scintillation pulse and, hence, the number of photons impinging the LAAPD. The number of photons produced per drifting electron and per kilovolt, the so-called scintillation amplification parameter, displays a small increase with pressure, ranging from 141 +/- 6 at 2 bar to 170 +/- 10 at 8 bar. In our setup, this Parameter does not increase above 8 bar due to nonnegligible electron attachment. The results are in good agreement with those presented in the literature in the 1 to 3 bar range. The increase of the scintillation amplification parameter with pressure for high gas densities has been also observed in former work at cryogenic temperatures.
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Morisi, S., & Peinado, E. (2011). Admixture of quasi-Dirac and Majorana neutrinos with tri-bimaximal mixing. Phys. Lett. B, 701(4), 451–457.
Abstract: We propose a realization of the so-called bimodal/schizophrenic model proposed recently. We assume 54, the permutation group of four objects as flavor symmetry giving tri-bimaximal lepton mixing at leading order. In these models the second massive neutrino state is assumed quasi-Dirac and the remaining neutrinos are Majorana states. In the case of inverse mass hierarchy, the lower bound on the neutrinoless double beta decay parameter m(ee) is about two times that of the usual lower bound, within the range of sensitivity of the next generation of experiments.
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NEXT Collaboration(Henriques, C. A. O. et al), Gomez-Cadenas, J. J., Alvarez, V., Benlloch-Rodriguez, J., Botas, A., Carcel, S., et al. (2017). Secondary scintillation yield of xenon with sub-percent levels of CO2 additive for rare-event detection. Phys. Lett. B, 773, 663–671.
Abstract: Xe-CO2 mixtures are important alternatives to pure xenon in Time Projection Chambers (TPC) based on secondary scintillation (electroluminescence) signal amplification with applications in the important field of rare event detection such as directional dark matter, double electron capture and double beta decay detection. The addition of CO2 to pure xenon at the level of 0.05-0.1% can reduce significantly the scale of electron diffusion from 10 mm/root m to 2.5 mm/root m, with high impact on the discrimination of the events through pattern recognition of the topology of primary ionization trails. We have measured the electroluminescence (EL) yield of Xe-CO2 mixtures, with sub-percent CO2 concentrations. We demonstrate that the EL production is still high in these mixtures, 70% and 35% relative to that produced in pure xenon, for CO2 concentrations around 0.05% and 0.1%, respectively. The contribution of the statistical fluctuations in EL production to the energy resolution increases with increasing CO2 concentration, being smaller than the contribution of the Fano factor for concentrations below 0.1% CO2.
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Watanabe, H., Watanabe, Y. X., Hirayama, Y., Andreyev, A. N., Hashimoto, T., Kondev, F. G., et al. (2021). Beta decay of the axially asymmetric ground state of Re-192. Phys. Lett. B, 814, 136088–6pp.
Abstract: The beta decay of Re-192(75)117, which lies near the boundary between the regions of predicted prolate and oblate deformations, has been investigated using the KEK Isotope Separation System (KISS) in RIKEN Nishina Center. This is the first case in which a low-energy beam of rhenium isotope has been successfully extracted from an argon gas-stopping cell using a laser-ionization technique, following production via multi-nucleon transfer between heavy ions. The ground state of Re-192 has been assigned J(pi) = (0(-)) based on the observed beta feedings and deduced logf t values towards the 0(+) and 2(+) states in Os-192, which is known as a typical gamma-soft nucleus. The shape transition from axial symmetry to axial asymmetry in the Re isotopes is discussed from the viewpoint of single-particle structure using the nuclear Skyrme-Hartree-Fock model.
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Watanabe, H. et al, & Montaner-Piza, A. (2021). Impact of shell evolution on Gamow-Teller beta decay from a high-spin long-lived isomer in Ag-127. Phys. Lett. B, 823, 136766–6pp.
Abstract: The change of the shell structure in atomic nuclei, so-called “nuclear shell evolution”, occurs due to changes of major configurations through particle-hole excitations inside one nucleus, as well as due to variation of the number of constituent protons or neutrons. We have investigated how the shell evolution affects Gamow-Teller (GT) transitions that dominate the beta decay in the region below Sn-132 using the newly obtained experimental data on a long-lived isomer in Ag-127. The T-1/2 = 67.5(9) ms isomer has been identified with a spin and parity of (27/2(+)) at an excitation energy of 1942(-20)(+14) keV, and found to decay via an internal transition of an E3 character, which competes with the dominant beta-decay branches towards the high-spin states in Cd-127. The underlying mechanism of a strong GT transition from the Ag-127 isomer is discussed in terms of configuration-dependent optimization of the effective single-particle energies in the framework of a shell-model approach.
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