Département de Physique des Particules

Neutrinoless double beta decay is a very powerful tool to investigate the fundamental character of neutrinos and to determine the absolute neutrino mass scale. To date, CUORE is the only fully approved next generation 1-ton size experiment with the goal of scrutinazing the inverted hierachy region for the effective Majorana mass. CUORE, presently being built in Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory, is an array of 988TeO2 cryogenic detectors containing 200 kg of Te-130, the neutrinoless double beta decay candidate. CUORE is due to start data taking in 2011. The feasibility of the project has been proved by CUORICINO, the pilot experiment taking data since 2003 with 62 TeO2 cryogenic detectors in Gran Sasso Laboratory. In this talk I will report on the latest results of CUORICINO and discuss CUORE potential and state of the art.