Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events: Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay in Te-130

CUORE is an international collaboration of researchers primarily from the United States and Italy. The detector uses cryogenic calorimeters to search for neutrinoless double beta decay in the isotope ¹³⁰Te. Whenever energy is deposited in the calorimeter (whether from a decay or an external particle interacting with the crystalline lattice), energy is deposited in the form of phonons, which is read out as heat. You can learn more about the physics of CUORE here.

My Work on CUORE:

Multidimensional approach to the search for decays to excited states: Previous CUORE(-0) analyses (like this and this) have set limits on the half-life of both neutrinoless and two neutrino double beta decay to excited states; such analyses can be enhanced through a spectral search. I am developing multi-dimensional cuts to identify signal and background events spread across multiple crystals with advanced patterns of energy deposition, taking into account scattered gamma events and multi-site topologies which make up a large number of previously rejected events. This search is informed by Monte Carlo simulations with cues from supervised machine learning algorithms.

INPA Presentation from April 2021