Sensitivity and Discovery Potential of CUORE to Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay

TL;DR

This paper evaluates CUORE's sensitivity to neutrinoless double-beta decay, showing it can probe half-lives up to 1.6×10^26 years and explore effective neutrino masses down to 40-100 meV after 5 years.

Contribution

It introduces methods to compute CUORE's experimental sensitivity and discovery potential for neutrinoless double-beta decay under various background scenarios.

Findings

CUORE's 1 sigma sensitivity: 1.6×10^26 years

Potential to probe neutrino mass down to 40-100 meV

Sensitivity at 90% confidence level: 9.5×10^25 years

Abstract

We present a study of the sensitivity and discovery potential of CUORE, a bolometric double-beta decay experiment under construction at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Two approaches to the computation of experimental sensitivity for various background scenarios are presented, and an extension of the sensitivity formulation to the discovery potential case is also discussed. Assuming a background rate of 10^-2 cts/(keV kg y), we find that, after 5 years of live time, CUORE has a 1 sigma sensitivity to the neutrinoless double-beta decay half-life of T_1/2(1 sigma) = 1.6 \times 10^26 y and thus a potential to probe the effective Majorana neutrino mass down to 40-100 meV; the sensitivity at 1.64 sigma, which corresponds to 90% C.L., will be T_1/2(1.64 sigma) = 9.5 \times 10^25 y. This range is compared with the claim of observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay in 76Ge and the preferred range of the neutrino mass parameter space from oscillation results.