Eur. Phys. J. C (2018) 78: 734
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6202-5

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Analysis of cryogenic calorimeters with light and heat read-out for double beta decay searches

¹ INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, 35020, Legnaro, Padua, Italy
² Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
³ Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, 00185, Rome, Italy
⁴ INFN, Sezione di Roma, 00185, Rome, Italy
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Milano-Bicocca, 20126, Milan, Italy
⁶ INFN, Sezione di Milano Bicocca, 20126, Milan, Italy
⁷ INFN, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Assergi, 67010, L’Aquila, Italy
⁸ GSSI, Gran Sasso Science Institute, 67100, L’Aquila, Italy
⁹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Genova, 16146, Genoa, Italy
¹⁰ INFN, Sezione di Genova, 16146, Genoa, Italy
¹¹ CSNSM, Univ. Paris-Sud, CNRS/IN2P3, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405, Orsay, France
¹² DiSAT, Università dell’Insubria, 22100, Como, Italy
¹³ IRFU, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
¹⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA
¹⁵ Present address: Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, 80805, Munich, Germany
¹⁶ Present address: Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009, Zaragoza, Spain
¹⁷ Present address: Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

^* e-mail: nicola.casali@roma1.infn.it

Received: 5 June 2018
Accepted: 28 August 2018
Published online: 12 September 2018

Abstract

The suppression of spurious events in the region of interest for neutrinoless double beta decay will play a major role in next generation experiments. The background of detectors based on the technology of cryogenic calorimeters is expected to be dominated by particles, that could be disentangled from double beta decay signals by exploiting the difference in the emission of the scintillation light. CUPID-0, an array of enriched ZnSe scintillating calorimeters, is the first large mass demonstrator of this technology. The detector started data-taking in 2017 at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso with the aim of proving that dual read-out of light and heat allows for an efficient suppression of the background. In this paper we describe the software tools we developed for the analysis of scintillating calorimeters and we demonstrate that this technology allows to reach an unprecedented background for cryogenic calorimeters.