CUORE Experiment

CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) is designed to detect the signature of a theoretical double-beta decay process in which no antineutrinos are created (neutrinoless double-beta decay or 0nbb ). The existence of the 0nbb decay mode could prove that the leptonic number is not conserved as assumed in the Standard Model. The neutrinoless double beta decay observation could help to understand the neutrino nature (Dirac or Majorana type) and could help to set stringent limits on theirs mass and could support cosmologic theories that consider the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe as due to neutrino interactions. CUORE detector is the first example of a cryogenic solid-state detector (bolometer) with nearly a ton of mass. It consists of 988 tellurium dioxide crystals for a total mass of 741 kg (206 kg of ¹³⁰Te which is the decaying component in the detector). To cool these detectors to a few millikelvin, the CUORE cryostat creates the coldest cubic meter in the known universe. The experiment is at this moment in its second year of data taking, from the five planned, at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (INFN. While no sign of neutrinoless double-beta decay was found, the data collected so far improved the bound on the rate of this process in the nuclei of tellurium atoms by a factor of two compared to the previous results. The interpretation of this result is a tighter bound on the allowed value of the neutrino mass in the Majorana hypothesis, which now extends below one-tenth of an electronvolt, at least 5 million times lighter than an electron.

Funding