CANDLES Collaboration Progress Update and Future Prospects

CANDLES experiment is looking for the neutrinoless double beta decay(0νββ) of 48Ca using 96 pure CaF2 crystals. The 0νββ decay is a lepton number violating process, which is possible if the neutrino is a Majorana nature particle.  If the 0νββ decay is observed, it confirms the Majorana nature of the neutrino as well as provide information about the absolute mass scale of the neutrino. 48Ca was chosen for CANDLES because it has the highest Q value among candidate isotopes at 4.27MeV. However, 48Ca has a low natural abundance and therefore an extremely low background detector is required to
detect the very rare 0νββ event. 

The CANDLES detector is currently operating at Kamioka underground observatory at 2700 meter water equivalent depth. In 2016, we upgraded the detector with lead and boron shielding, installed new DAQ system and installed magnetic cancellation coils. The physics run after the upgrades were taken in a cooled environment. In this presentation, we report on the status of CANDLES experiment after the upgrades, the performance of the upgrades as well as future prospects for CANDLES experiment. For future analysis prospects, we present GPU accelerated machine learning approaches for waveform classification and background reduction.