Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Recent Work Title Sensitivity and Discovery Potential of CUORE to Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay Permalink

Deceased Presently at: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA Presently at: Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA 94551 USA Preprint submitted to Astroparticle Physics March 21, 2013 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 cts/(keVkg y), we find that, after 5 years of live time, CUORE will have a 1σ sensitivity to the neutrinoless double-beta decay half-life of T̂ 0ν 1/2(1σ) = 1.6× 10 26 y and thus a potential to probe the effective Majorana neutrino mass down to 40–100 meV; the sensitivity at 1.64σ, which corresponds to 90% C.L., will be T̂ 0ν 1/2(1.64σ) = 9.5 × 10 25 y. This range is compared with the claim of observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay in Ge and the preferred range in the neutrino mass parameter space from oscillation results.