CUORE sensitivity to 0νββ decay

Abstract

We report a study of the CUORE sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay. We used a Bayesian analysis based on a toy Monte Carlo (MC) approach to extract the exclusion sensitivity to the 0νββ decay half-life (T[superscript 0ν][subscript 1/2]) at 90% credibility interval (CI) – i.e. the interval containing the true value of T[superscript 0ν][subcript 1/2] with 90% probability – and the 3σ discovery sensitivity. We consider various background levels and energy resolutions, and describe the influence of the data division in subsets with different background levels. If the background level and the energy resolution meet the expectation, CUORE will reach a 90% CI exclusion sensitivity of 2·10[superscript 25] year with 3 months, and 9·10[superscript 25] year with 5 years of live time. Under the same conditions, the discovery sensitivity after 3 months and 5 years will be 7·1024 year and 4·10[superscript 25] year, respectively.