Physical Society Colloquium

First Results from CUORE:
Majorana Neutrinos and the Search for Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay

Lindley Winslow

Department of Physics
MIT

The neutrino is unique among the Standard Model particles. It is the only fundamental fermion that could be its own antiparticle, a Majorana particle. A Majorana neutrino would acquire mass in a fundamentally different way than the other particles and this would have profound consequences to particle physics and cosmology. The only feasible experiments to determine the Majorana nature of the neutrino are searches for the rare nuclear process neutrinoless double-beta decay. CUORE uses tellurium dioxide crystals cooled to 10 mK to search for this rare process. In this talk, I will present the first results from this detector and highlight my group's R&D efforts and our other efforts including axions and nanoparticle-based liquid scintillators.