Preliminary Design of the nEXO Experiment*

The nEXO experiment is a proposed next-generation search for the neutrinoless double beta decay of Xe-136. The primary detector will be a 5-ton, monolithic liquid xenon TPC with a target enriched to 90% in the isotope of interest. Building on the successes of the EXO-200 experiment, the nEXO collaboration has developed a conservative baseline design with the projected capability of excluding a decay half-life up to 9.2e27 years at the 90% confidence level. Such an experiment would improve on the best existing measurements by nearly two orders of magnitude. In this talk, we will introduce this design and discuss how nEXO addresses the stringent low-background specifications using a combination of conservative choices driven by EXO-200 measurements and novel readout schemes designed to improve the noise rejection and resolution of the detector. We will briefly describe the ongoing R&D work to demonstrate the design and validate the projected sensitivity of nEXO.