Ion Beam Systems for Barium Tagging in Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

The NEXT collaboration develops time projection to chambers to test whether neutrinos are their own antiparticle, via the process known as neutrinoless double beta decay.  A positive signal would provide an intriguing insight to the question of how our universe came to acquire an asymmetry of matter over antimatter. Detecting such a signal requires a detection environment immune to background interference (or at least reduced it to negligible levels) from gamma rays. To achieve this, the NEXT collaboration is developing Barium tagging systems which may tag ions of barium with single molecule fluorescence imaging. I will present technical progress on the barium ion test beam developed at the University of Texas at Arlington to test this system.