The NEXT experiment has achieved a major milestone with the start of the xenon run in the NEW detector. The program foresees an initial calibration run with krypton followed by further calibrations with other radioactive sources.

Here you can see an example of krypton signals observed today, seen by the silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) of the tracking plane and by the photomultipliers (PMT) of the energy plane.

NEW is alive and running! Here you can see a beautiful waveform of an alpha particle releasing its energy in argon gas at 5 bar of pressure. The large peak at 600 microsecond is the secondary scintillation signal, preceded few tens of microseconds before by the primary one. The small peaks at lower times are believed to be electrons coming from the rubidium source decay, which we have inserted in the gas as a calibration tool.

Stay tuned for the upcoming xenon run!

The last piece of the NEXT cryo-recovery system is installed in Canfranc, a protection against splashes which allows us to operate safely with xenon.

Juan José Gómez Cadenas, the NEXT spokesperson, has been selected among the eleven of the "Selección española de ciencia" (Spanish Science National Team), promoted by the outreach journal Quo. Here you can find the interview to Juanjo in Quo (in Spanish).