Speaker
Description
The discovery of neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) would have a profound impact on particle physics. This would show Lepton number is not conserved and neutrinos are Majorana particles. Unfortunately for us, the expected rate of this decay is vanishingly small. This creates an extremely large experimental challenge, the largest of which is to control the rate of background events to just a few per 10 years of data taking. The LEGEND collaboration is searching for $0\nu\beta\beta$ with HPGe detectors, enriched in $^{76}$Ge, operated in LAr using a phased approach. The first phase LEGEND-200 is currently taking data in LNGS, Italy. In this talk we will review the status of LEGEND-200 and the first $0\nu\beta\beta$ search. We will particularly focus on recent efforts to model the experimental data and background sources, both before and after our analysis cuts.