Evidence of Single State Dominance in the Two-Neutrino Double Beta Decay with CUPID-0

English
Monday, 13 January, 2020

The double beta decay is the rarest nuclear process in Nature wiith typical half-lives exceeding 10^18 years. The most precise measurement of this process was recently published by the CUPID-0 experiment, which is running since 2017 in the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso. The high precision attained by CUPID-0 allowed also to unveil the nuclear mechanism mediating the double beta decay of the Se-82 isotope.

Prof. Francesco Iachello, inventor of the Interacting Boson Model, underlines the importance of this result, that was published in the Physical Review Letters in December 2019 (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.262501): "This result changes our way of thinking and has to be further understood”.

The Roma group, consisting of researchers of the Sapienza Physics Department and of the INFN Roma Division (F. Bellini, L. Cardani, N. Casali, A. Cruciani, I. Dafinei, F. Ferroni, C. Tomei, V. Pettinacci, M. Vignati) led the construction of the detector and the software development, and was strongly involved in the data analysis that allowed to reach this result.

The successful experience of CUPID-0 motivated our group in continuing with the next-generation project CUPID, that will allow to search for many processes beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics with unprecedented sensitivity.

 

L' Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" - Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma