Searching for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with a Cold Heart

by Prof. Brian Fujikawa (LAwrence Berkeley Laboratory, UCB)

Thursday Apr 11, 2019, 3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Pacific/Honolulu

112 Watanabe Hall

The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE, aka the "cold heart") is a tonne-scale segmented bolometric detector located at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare Laboratori Nationali del Gran Sasso in Italy, and the primary goal of CUORE is to search for the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of Te-130. Following the completion of the final year-long construction and commissioning campaign, the CUORE detector was cooled down to a base temperature below 8 mK in January 2017, and the collecting of the first production data began the following May. I will describe the CUORE detector, and present the first physics results from the initial datasets. I will conclude by describing R&D efforts towards the next generation bolometric detector: CUORE Upgrade with Particle ID (CUPID), which has the goal of searching for 0νββ in the full so-called Inverted Mass Hierarchy region.