Abstract
Vibrations from experimental setups and the environment are a persistent source of noise for low-temperature calorimeters searching for rare events, including neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay or dark matter interactions. Such noise can significantly limit experimental sensitivity to the physics case under investigation. Here, we report the detection of marine microseismic vibrations using mK-scale calorimeters. This study employs a multi-device analysis correlating data from CUORE, the leading experiment in the search for 0νββ decay with mK-scale calorimeters, and the Copernicus Earth Observation program, revealing the seasonal impact of Mediterranean Sea activity on CUORE’s energy thresholds, resolution, and sensitivity over four years. The detection of marine microseisms underscores the need to address faint environmental noise in ultra-sensitive experiments. Understanding how such noise couples to the detector and developing mitigation strategies is essential for next-generation experiments. We demonstrate one such strategy: a noise decorrelation algorithm implemented in CUORE using auxiliary sensors, which reduces vibrational noise and improves detector performance. Enhancing sensitivity to 0νββ decay and to rare events with low-energy signatures requires identifying unresolved noise sources, advancing noise reduction methods, and improving vibration suppression systems, all of which inform the design of next-generation rare event experiments.
Data availability
The data used in this study include raw bolometer waveform data as well as higher-level processed data products derived from these waveforms for analysis, together with associated environmental and auxiliary data. These data are stored on internal computing clusters of the CUORE Collaboration and are not publicly available due to their size and collaboration access policies. No accession codes or persistent identifiers are associated with these datasets. The data are available for scientific purposes from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, who is responsible for handling data access inquiries.
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Acknowledgements
The CUORE Collaboration thanks the directors and staff of the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso and the technical staff of our laboratories. This work was supported by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN); the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. NSF-PHY-0605119, NSF-PHY-0500337, NSF-PHY-0855314, NSF-PHY-0902171, NSF-PHY-0969852, NSF-PHY-1307204, NSF-PHY-1314881, NSF-PHY-1401832, NSF-PHY-1913374, and NSF-PHY-2412377; Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pittsburgh. This material is also based upon work supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science under Contract Nos. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and DE-AC52-07NA27344; by the DOE Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under Contract Nos. DE-FG02-08ER41551, DE-FG03-00ER41138, DE-SC0012654, DE-SC0020423, DE-SC0019316 and DE-SC0011091. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). This work makes use of both the DIANA data analysis and APOLLO data acquisition software packages, which were developed by the CUORICINO, CUORE, LUCIFER, and CUPID-0 Collaborations. The authors acknowledge the Advanced Research Computing at Virginia Tech and the Yale Center for Research Computing for providing computational resources and technical support that have contributed to the results reported within this paper. This study has been conducted using E.U. Copernicus Marine Service information and data from the INGV GIGS seismic station.
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All listed authors have contributed to the present publication. The different contributions span from the design and construction of the detector and the cryogenic system to the acquisition and analysis of data. The manuscript underwent an internal review process extended to the whole collaboration, and all authors approved its final version; the authors’ names are listed alphabetically.
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Adams, D.Q., Alduino, C., Alfonso, K. et al. The detection of marine microseismic activity with the CUORE tonne-scale cryogenic experiment. Commun Phys (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-025-02484-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-025-02484-5
