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is an experiment designed to search for double beta decay of 136 Xe with a single-phase, liquid xenon detector. It uses an active mass of 110 kg of xenon enriched to 80.6% in the isotope 136 in an ultra-low background time projection chamber capable of simultaneous detection of ionization and scintillation. This paper describes the EXO-200 detector with particular attention to the most innovative aspects of the design that revolve around the reduction of backgrounds, the efficient use of the expensive isotopically enriched xenon, and the optimization of the energy resolution in a relatively large volume.-1 -arXiv:1202.2192v2 [physics.ins-det]

Abstract-Large-scale MIMO systems can yield a substantial improvements in spectral efficiency for future communication systems. Due to the finer spatial resolution and array gain achieved by a massive number of antennas at the base station, these systems have shown to be robust to inter-user interference and the use of linear precoding appears to be asymptotically optimal. However, from a practical point of view, most precoding schemes exhibit prohibitively high computational complexity as the system dimensions increase. For example, the near-optimal regularized zero forcing (RZF) precoding requires the inversion of a large matrix. To solve this issue, we propose in this paper to approximate the matrix inverse by a truncated polynomial expansion (TPE), where the polynomial coefficients are optimized to maximize the system performance. This technique has been recently applied in single cell scenarios and it was shown that a small number of coefficients is sufficient to reach performance similar to that of RZF, while it was not possible to surpass RZF.In a realistic multi-cell scenario involving large-scale multiuser MIMO systems, the optimization of RZF precoding has, thus far, not been feasible. This is mainly attributed to the high complexity of the scenario and the non-linear impact of the necessary regularizing parameters. On the other hand, the scalar coefficients in TPE precoding give hope for possible throughput optimization. To this end, we exploit random matrix theory to derive a deterministic expression of the asymptotic signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio for each user based on channel statistics. We also provide an optimization algorithm to approximate the coefficients that maximize the network-wide weighted max-min fairness. The optimization weights can be used to mimic the user throughput distribution of RZF precoding. Using simulations, we compare the network throughput of the proposed TPE precoding with that of the suboptimal RZF scheme and show that our scheme can achieve higher throughput using a TPE order of only 5.

We report the observation of two-neutrino double-beta decay in (136)Xe with T(1/2) = 2.11 ± 0.04(stat) ± 0.21(syst) × 10(21) yr. This second-order process, predicted by the standard model, has been observed for several nuclei but not for (136)Xe. The observed decay rate provides new input to matrix element calculations and to the search for the more interesting neutrinoless double-beta decay, the most sensitive probe for the existence of Majorana particles and the measurement of the neutrino mass scale.

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