MG14 - Talk detail

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Experiments to search for neutrinoless double beta decay are considered as a unique way to test the lepton number conservation, determine nature of neutrino (Dirac or Majorana particle), absolute mass scale and neutrino mass hierarchy. Next generation double beta decay experiments call for development of highly radiopure high quality crystal scintillators from enriched isotopes to provide as high as possible concentration of nuclei of interest and therefore, to increase experimental sensitivity. Production cycle of crystal scintillators from enriched isotopes should include deep purification of enriched materials, crystal growth, recycling of costly enriched materials, careful protection from cosmogenic and neutron activations. Cadmium tungstate crystal scintillators developed from enriched cadmium 106 and 116 show a high performance in terms of radiopurity levels and detectors performance allowing high sensitivity investigations of double beta decay of 106Cd and 116Cd. Recently a high quality zinc molybdate crystal boule enriched in 100Mo to 99 % with a mass of ~1.4 kg was grown for the first time by the low-thermal gradient Czochralski technique in the framework of LUMINEU project aiming to develop a large cryogenic detector to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 100Mo. The production cycles provided a high yield of the crystal boules (more than 80 % of the initial charge) and an acceptable level (less than 4%) of irrecoverable losses of the costly enriched materials. These encouraging results pave the way to future sensitive double beta searches, capable to explore the inverted hierarchy region of the neutrino mass hierarchy. The technology can be applied for high sensitivity dark matter experiments too.

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