Status and future prospect of 48Ca double beta decay search in CANDLES

Abstract

The observation of neutrino-less double beta decay (0vßß) would be the most practical way to prove the Majorana nature of the neutrino and lepton number violation. CANDLES studies 48Ca double beta decay using CaF2 scintillator. The main advantage of 48Ca is that it has the highest Q-value (4.27 MeV) among all the isotope candidates for 0vßß. The CANDLES III detector is currently operating with 300kg CaF2 crystals in the Kamioka underground observatory, Japan. In 2014, a detector cooling system and a magnetic cancellation coil was installed with the aim to increase light emission of CaF2 scintillator and photo-electron collection efficiency of the photo-multipliers. After this upgrade, light yield was increased to 1000 p.e./MeV which is 1.6 times larger than before. According to data analysis and simulation, main background source in CANDLES is turned out to be high energy external gamma-ray originating neutron capture on the surrounding materials, so called (n,γ). Upgrading the detector by installing neutron and gamma-ray shield can reduce the remaining main backgrounds by two order magnitude. In this report, we discuss the detail of (n,γ) and background reduction by additional shielding.