An active-shield method for the reduction of surface contamination in CUORE

The main goal of the CUOREexperiment is to search for the neutrinoless double beta decayof 130Te. As it is a rare nuclear decay, the sensitivity of the experiment strongly depends on the background level in the transition energy region. In this paper we describe the R&D work performed to develop an active method for the reduction of radioactive background in CUORE. The idea is to reject events originated by surface contamination in large mass bolometric detectors by using bolometerssensitive to surface events. Results obtained with the first prototypes and tests made with large mass surface sensitive bolometerswill be reported.