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Speaker: Dr. Michel Dolinski, Drexel University

Abstract: Because neutrinos interact only weakly with normal matter, they are extremely difficult to study in the laboratory. However, studying neutrinos can give us a better understanding of the origin and structure of the universe. It is an experimentally open question whether neutrinos have distinct antiparticles, and the answer is directly related to the origin of neutrino mass. The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay, a non-Standard Model version of a rare nuclear process, would prove that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. I will report the most recent results from the EXO-200 experiment, a liquid xenon time projection chamber that uses 200 kg of enriched xenon to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. I will also talk about the future of double beta decay research in the context of neutrino measurements from cosmology and long baseline experiments.