Status of the CUORE experiment and results of CUORICINO: searching for 0νDBD of 130Te with low temperature detectors

The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) is an experiment under construction at Gran Sasso National Laboratories in Italy to search for neutrinoless double beta decay in 130Te and other rare processes. The observation of 0νDBD would indicate that neutrinos are Majorana particles and would provide information about the absolute neutrino mass scale. CUORE is a bolometric detector composed of 988 TeO2 crystals, with a total mass of about 750 kg of natural tellurium. Cuoricino, the predecessor experiment operated at LNGS until 2008, employed an array of large cubic TeO2 crystals with a total mass of 40 kg. We will discuss the status of the CUORE experiment, including a discussion of critical points, the recent R and D efforts, and the anticipated sensitivity. We will also discuss the performance of the Cuoricino detector, and present the physics results.