High Energy Physics Seminar

The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) is the first ton-scale bolometric experiment searching for neutrinoless double beta decay. The detector consists of an array of 988 TeO2 crystals arranged in a cylindrical compact structure of 19 towers. After the completion of the detector construction in August 2016, CUORE was successfully cooled down to a base temperature below 8 mK by the beginning of 2017. The first physics data were taken in May-September 2017, resulting in the most stringent limits to date on the neutrinoless double-beta decay of Te-130. I will describe the performance of the CUORE detector systems, discuss the first physics results from CUORE, and introduce the concept for a next-generation detector, CUPID, that would probe the Majorana nature of neutrinos down to the mass scale of 10 meV.