Nuclear transparency and double beta decay of molybdenum 100. Annual progress report, February 1, 1994--January 31, 1995

During the past year, work has been nearly completed on a Physical Review paper with final results of a search for neutrinoless double-β decay of molybdenum 100 with collaborators from LBL, the University of New Mexico, and the Idaho Engineering Laboratory. Major part of this work was to carry out an extensive statistical analysis of the data. During the spring of 1994, Sean Sutton spent the majority of this time at Orsay, France working on NEMO 3, a next generation double-β decay experiment involving molybdenum 100 and other isotopes. Nicholson and Sutton have designed and built a scintillating fiber hadoscope used in the May--July AGS high energy physics run at BNL in AGS experiment 850 to measure color transparency. Professor Nicholson has had primary responsibility for the design, construction, and installation of this hodoscope and for overseeing the construction and installation of two scintillating counter upstream hodoscopes. To date, the fiber hodoscope had handled total beam rates exceeding 20 MHz with beam rates as high as 10 MHz on a single fiber. Light intensification and readout electronics to be used in the CsI(Tl) calorimeter in the SLAC B factory has just begun this summer