In 1936, Ettore Majorana imagined—or perhaps dreamed—that the neutrino was its own
antiparticle. NEXT is one of the world’s leading experiments aiming to confirm that intuition—or
dream—within the next decade. In its own way, NEXT is also a dream, one that has transformed—
much to the surprise of many, including the dreamers themselves—into a precision machine
capable of vindicating the mysterious Ettore, nearly a century after his disappearance in the
Tyrrhenian Sea.

J.J. Gómez-Cadenas is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at DIPC. He has worked on the K2K
and T2K experiments, which played a key role in establishing the existence of neutrino oscillations
(Breakthrough Prize 2016), and since 2008 he has led the NEXT experiment, which aims to
identify neutrinoless double beta decays at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory (LSC). He has
received two ERC grants (AdG/ERC in 2013 and SyG/ERC in 2020) to develop the NEXT
experiment. He has been accused—perhaps not unfairly—of writing novels and other books.