Scintillating bolometers for rare event studies

In many rare event studies, the possibility to have high resolution detectors in which the different background components can be tagged results to be very appealing. This possibility can be fulfilled by the use of scintillating bolometers, which allow distinguishing the contribution due to α from the one due to β-γ activity. This is obtained by comparing the thermal and scintillation signals in hybrid detectors in which both signals are collected using two independent bolometers. Several scintillating crystals have been tested in the last few years in Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. The excellent results obtained with some crystals (CdWO4, BGO, ZnSe, CaMoO4,⋯) represent a tangible proof demonstrating the feasibility of this kind of technique. We report here the results obtained so far concerning energy resolutions, light yield and alpha discrimination efficiency, together with a very interesting feature observed in some compounds: the possibility to discriminate β-γ events from those induced by α particles thanks to a different thermal pulse shape, without the need of an independent light detector. This would greatly simplify the detector structure, showing another interesting property of bolometers for rare event studies.