From Cuoricino to CUORE: Investigating neutrino properties with double beta decay

CUORE is the only fully approved 1-ton size neutrinoless double beta decay experiment to date, with the goal of scrutinazing the inverted hierachy region for the effective Majorana mass. CUORE, presently being built in Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory, is an array of 988 TeO2 cryogenic detectors containing 200kg of 130Te, the neutrinoless double beta decay candidate. CUORE is due to start data taking in 2012. The feasibility of the project has been proved by Cuoricino, the pilot experiment that took data until 2008, for about five years, with 62 TeO2 cryogenic detectors. Cuoricino will be superseded in 2010 by CUORE-0, the first CUORE tower to be installed in Cuoricino cryogenic facility, which will take data until CUORE start. In this paper the final results of Cuoricino are reported, and CUORE-0 and CUORE potential and state of the art are discussed. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.