What is CUORE/Cuoricino?
The recent success in neutrino oscillation experiments has shown that the three kinds of neutrinos can oscillate into one another. This implies that they have mass. The next questions are: what are their masses? which one is heaviest? lightest? are they Majorana or Dirac particles? Neutrino-less double-beta decay (0νββ) experiments such as CUORE address these questions.
CUORE stands for Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events, and is a detector for neutrinoless double-beta decay and other rare events such as detection of dark matter like axions or WIMPs. Cuoricino (little Cuore) is the prototype for CUORE, and is the largest double-beta decay experiment in operation today (cuore: Italian for "heart"). It is located within the mountain of Gran Sasso, about 100-km east of Rome in Italy.
The Underground Laboratories is located in the mountain of Gran Sasso (meaning something like "Big Pebble ") which provides rock overburden of 1400 m, or 3800 m.w.e., shielding us from much of cosmic ray background, reducing the muon flux to only those with energy > 1.4 TeV which results in 1 muon per square meter per hour inside the laboratories. In addition, the Gran Sasso rock has a low rate of natural radioactivity, making this an ideal place to do experiments that require very low background radiation, such as our double-beta decay experiment.
