Speaker
Description
The LEGEND experiment searches for neutrinoless double beta decay in $^{76}$Ge-enriched high-purity germanium detectors operating in liquid argon, whose scintillation acts as an active veto against external background events. Using specialized detector geometries, pulse shape discrimination is performed to further veto background events. LEGEND-200 has completed about one year of stable physics data-taking at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy, with the first data recently unblinded and analyzed. With a planned ultimate exposure of 1 ton·yr and a target background index of $2 \times 10^{-4}$ cts/(keV·kg·yr) at Q$_{\beta\beta}$ = 2039 keV, LEGEND-200 is expected to reach a 3σ discovery sensitivity of 10$^{27}$ years half-life. The next generation experiment, LEGEND-1000, will operate 1000 kg of detectors and reach an expected discovery sensitivity of 10$^{28}$ years half-life, covering the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy. In this talk, an overview of LEGEND will be presented with some focus on detector performance.
This work is supported by the U.S. DOE, and the NSF, the LANL, ORNL and LBNL LDRD programs; the European ERC and Horizon programs; the German DFG, BMBF, and MPG; the Italian INFN; the Polish NCN and MNiSW; the Czech MEYS; the Slovak RDA; the Swiss SNF; the UK STFC; the Canadian NSERC and CFI; the LNGS and SURF facilities.
