Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74: 3133
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3133-7

Letter

Enriched ZnMoO scintillating bolometers to search for decay of Mo with the LUMINEU experiment

¹ Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 117218, Moscow, Russia
² Institute for Nuclear Research, MSP, Kiev, 03680, Ukraine
³ Centre de Sciences Nucléaires et de Sciences de la Matière, 91405, Orsay, France
⁴ Dipartimento di Scienza e Alta Tecnologia dell’Università dell’Insubria, 22100, Como, Italy
⁵ INFN, Sezione di Milano Bicocca, 20126, Milan, Italy
⁶ Nikolaev Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia
⁷ Service de Physique des Particules, CEA-Saclay, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
⁸ INFN, Sezione di Roma “La Sapienza”, 00185, Rome, Italy
⁹ CNRS, Université de Bordeaux, ICMCB, 33608, Pessac, France
¹⁰ CML Ltd., 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia

^* e-mail: andrea.giuliani@csnsm.in2p3.fr

Received: 5 July 2014
Accepted: 16 October 2014
Published online: 29 October 2014

Abstract

The LUMINEU project is a demonstrator experiment that will search for the neutrinoless double beta decay of the isotope Mo embedded in zinc molybdate (ZnMoO) scintillating bolometers. In this context, a zinc molybdate crystal boule enriched in Mo to 99.5 % with a mass of 171 g was grown for the first time by the low-thermal-gradient Czochralski technique. The production cycle provided a high yield (the crystal boule mass was 84 % of the initial charge) and an acceptable level—around 4 %—of irrecoverable losses of the costly enriched material. Two crystals of 59 and 63 g, obtained from the enriched boule, were tested above ground at millikelvin temperatures as scintillating bolometers. They showed a good detection performance, equivalent to that of previously developed natural ZnMoO detectors. These results pave the way to future sensitive searches based on the LUMINEU technology, capable of approaching and exploring the inverted hierarchy region of the neutrino mass pattern.