https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7078-8
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Background model of the CUPID-0 experiment
1
INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, 35020, Legnaro, Padova, 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, 67100, Assergi, L’Aquila, Italy
8
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
IRFU, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
13
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA
14
Present address: Physics Department, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada
15
Present address: Fundación ARAID and Laboratorio de Física Nuclear y Astroparticulas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Calle Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009, Zaragoza, Spain
16
Present address: CSNSM, Univ. Paris-Sud, CNRS/IN2P3, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405, Orsay, France
* e-mail: davide.chiesa@mib.infn.it
Received:
24
April
2019
Accepted:
27
June
2019
Published online:
11
July
2019
CUPID-0 is the first large mass array of enriched Zn
Se scintillating low temperature calorimeters, operated at LNGS since 2017. During its first scientific runs, CUPID-0 collected an exposure of 9.95 kg year. Thanks to the excellent rejection of 
particles, we attained the lowest background ever measured with thermal detectors in the energy region where we search for the signature of 
neutrinoless double beta decay. In this work we develop a model to reconstruct the CUPID-0 background over the whole energy range of experimental data. We identify the background sources exploiting their distinctive signatures and we assess their extremely low contribution [down to 
counts/(keV kg year)] in the region of interest for neutrinoless double beta decay search. This result represents a crucial step towards the comprehension of the background in experiments based on scintillating calorimeters and in next generation projects such as CUPID.
© The Author(s), 2019
