New Data Release from CUORE Features a “Noise-Canceling” Algorithm

“It’s exciting because we’re unveiling how we got to be in this universe we are in,” added Samantha Pagan, a former graduate student at Yale University and part of the large team (made mostly of students and postdocs) that reprocessed and analyzed the dataset. “And because CUORE is so sensitive, we can also do another whole program of physics with the detector where we look for dark matter.”

In addition to neutrinos and dark matter, CUORE’s sensitivity means it can also be used to study the physics of Earth itself. Researchers are already collaborating with geophysicists to understand how wind storms in Italy can affect the underground environment for sensitive detectors.

“We built this to be a particle detector, but it’s also an amazing seismometer,” said Yury Kolomensky, a scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor at UC Berkeley. “One vision is to have technology like CUPID and CUORE deployed in multiple locations around the world that could study the propagation of earthquakes and the Earth’s core, as well as dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay. We’re seeing how these very cool techniques for our detector can have implications for other fields of science.”

CUORE began operating in 2017 and has been taking data steadily since 2019, setting a record for keeping such a large amount of material at such cold temperatures for so long. The experiment plans to continue collecting data through 2025.

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