Shilo Xia

Shilo Xia's picture
Chamberlain Fellow
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Research Areas: 
Nuclear and Particle Physics
Research Type: 
Theorist & Experimentalist
Education: 
Ph.D. Yale University, 2020
Advisor: 
David C. Moore
Dissertation Title: 
Search for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay and Detector Physics Measurements with the Final EXO-200 Dataset
Dissertation Abstract: 

Liquid xenon (LXe) is employed in a number of current and future detectors for rare event searches. This work presents the latest results from the EXO-200 experiment, which searched for neutrinoless double beta decay (0$\nu\beta\beta$) in $^{136}$Xe between 2011 and 2018. With upgraded hardware, increased exposure and analysis improvements, the detector resolution, sensitivity and final data limit were also improved over time.

Taking advantage of a single-phase, large detector with good purity and well-calibrated energy response, measurements of the absolute scintillation and ionization yields generated by MeV energy gamma sources over a range of electric fields was performed in EXO-200 and are presented in this thesis. These measurements are useful for simulating the performance of future 0$\nu\beta\beta$ detectors employing LXe, such as nEXO, which is a next generation 0$\nu\beta\beta$ experiment using $^{136}$Xe aiming to reach a half-life sensitivity $\sim10^{28}$ years. The development of high-bandwidth digital cable prototypes with sufficiently low radioactivity for use in nEXO is described in the end.