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

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and analysis of cryogenic scintillating calorimeters with dual light and heat read-out, demonstrating their effectiveness in reducing background noise for neutrinoless double beta decay experiments.

Contribution

It introduces software tools for analyzing scintillating calorimeters and shows that this technology achieves unprecedented background suppression.

Findings

Effective alpha background suppression demonstrated

Software tools enable detailed calorimeter analysis

First large-mass demonstration of dual read-out technology

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 {\alpha} 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 Zn$^{82}$Se 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 {\alpha} 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.