Latest advances in barium tagging technology with the NEXT experiment

NEXT is an experimental program searching for neutrinoless double beta decay (0nuBB) using high-pressure gaseous time projection chamber technology with enriched xenon. The latest experiment in the program, NEXT-100, is currently being constructed at the Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc in the Spanish Pyrenees and will perform a competitive search for 0nuBB utilizing excellent topological reconstruction and energy measurement at 1% FWHM at 2.5 MeV. In order to reach sensitivities towards 10³⁰ years in the 0nuBB half-life, which is several orders of magnitude higher than current best limits, future, larger, detectors will require new methods to reduce the backgrounds to negligible levels, the NEXT collaboration is actively working towards the development of novel technology to tag the barium daughter ion from the decay. If realized, this technique could enable a background-free 0nuBB search. This talk will present the latest advances in barium tagging being developed by the NEXT collaboration.