Abstract

The LHC has helped complete the Standard Model; it has also left open some gaping holes. Among these are any prediction of dark matter, a sufficient source for the matter and antimatter imbalance in the universe or an adequate explanation of neutrino mass. In this talk, I will describe experimental techniques that use beta decay at ultra low temperatures, to search parameter space not yet easily accessible to accelerators. Half of the talk will be devoted to ultracold neutrons (UCN), that allow us to probe TeV scale physics by trapping these 1 mK free neutrons. One such experiment, UCN $\tau$, aims to measure the neutron lifetime, currently unresolved by a discrepancy large enough to hint at new physics. The other half of the talk will be about CUORE , an experiment that uses nearly 1 ton of ultracold bolometers at 10 mK to look for neutrinoless double beta decay, a process that can detect strong lepton number violation.