Researchers believe that their latest successful experiment holds the key to why there is an abundance of matter over antimatter in the universe.
An international team of nuclear physicists announced the first scientific results from the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) experiment. CUORE, located at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories in Italy, was designed to confirm the existence of the Majorana neutrino.
The findings were twofold. First, the CUORE-0 results placed some of the most sensitive constraints on the mass of the elusive Majorana neutrino to date. With these new constraints, the CUORE team was essentially shrinking the size of the haystack that hides the Majorana needle, making it much more likely to be found.
Second, the experiment, successfully demonstrated the performance of CUORE’s novel design, a detector made of towers of Rubik’s cube-sized crystals of tellurium dioxide. These towers are placed in a high-tech refrigerator that has been painstakingly decontaminated, shielded from cosmic rays, and cooled to near absolute zero.
The results represented data collected over two years from just one tower of tellurium dioxide crystals. By the end of the year, all 19 towers, each containing 52 crystals, will be online, increasing CUORE’s sensitivity by a factor of 20.
The CUORE experiment sits about a kilometer beneath the tallest mountain of the Apennine range in Italy, where rock shields it from cosmic rays.
