Probing the neutrino mass scale – first results and future perspectives of KATRIN
Institutskolloquium
- Datum: 06.11.2020
- Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00
- Vortragende: Prof. Dr. Kathrin Valerius
- Ort: Zoom
- Gastgeber: IPP
- Kontakt: daniel.told@ipp.mpg.de
Precision measurements of the kinematics of weak decays offer a direct and nearly model-independent approach to probe the absolute neutrino mass scale. The KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN) is searching for the minute imprint of the neutrino mass in the endpoint region of the tritium beta-decay spectrum.
KATRIN employs a high-intensity gaseous molecular tritium source and a high-resolution electrostatic filter with magnetic adiabatic collimation to target a neutrino-mass sensitivity of 0.2 eV/c2, thus improving on previous experiments by an order of magnitude, after five years of data-taking.
This
talk presents the results of the first science run of KATRIN in which
an initial dataset of a few weeks allows to tighten the direct neutrino
mass bound by about a factor of 2 already, yielding a new upper limit of
1.1 eV/c2 (90%
CL). The successful first campaign gives promising perspectives on the
long-term data harvest to exploit KATRIN’s neutrino mass sensitivity
goal and to open up further interesting science channels in the search
for physics beyond the Standard Model.