- Artusa, DR
- Avignone, FT
- Beeman, JW
- Dafinei, I
- Dumoulin, L
- Ge, Z
- Giuliani, A
- Gotti, C
- de Marcillac, P
- Marnieros, S
- Nagorny, S
- Nisi, S
- Nones, C
- Norman, EB
- Novati, V
- Olivieri, E
- Orlandi, D
- Pagnanini, L
- Pattavina, L
- Pessina, G
- Pirro, S
- Poda, DV
- Rusconi, C
- Schäffner, K
- Scielzo, ND
- Zhu, Y
- et al.
© 2017 The Authors We present the performances of two 92% enriched 130TeO2 crystals operated as thermal bolometers in view of a next generation experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 130Te. The crystals, 435 g each, show an energy resolution, evaluated at the 2615 keV γ-line of 208Tl, of 6.5 and 4.3 keV FWHM. The only observable internal radioactive contamination arises from 238U (15 and 8 μBq/kg, respectively). The internal activity of the most problematic nuclei for neutrinoless double beta decay, 226Ra and 228Th, are both evaluated as <3.1 μBq/kg for one crystal and <2.3 μBq/kg for the second. Thanks to the readout of the weak Cherenkov light emitted by β/γ particles by means of Neganov–Luke bolometric light detectors we were able to perform an event-by-event identification of β/γ events with a 95% acceptance level, while establishing a rejection factor of 98.21% and 99.99% for α particles.