Frankfurt 2014 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 35: Astroteilchenphysik

HK 35.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 19. März 2014, 18:00–18:15, HZ 9

Radon backgrounds in the KATRIN experiment — •Richard Rink, Stefan Görhardt, and Jan Oertlin for the KATRIN collaboration — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institut für Kernphysik (IKP)

The KATRIN experiment aims to determine the effective mass of the electron anti-neutrino with a sensitivity of 200 meV by investigating the kinematics of tritium β-decay. In order to achieve this sensitivity, the overall background of the experiment needs to be on the order of 0.01 counts per second.

The decay of radon atoms, which emanate from different sources inside the spectrometer, produces high energy (order of 10 keV) electrons. These electrons can be stored inside the spectrometer because of the magnetic mirror effect and create a large number of secondary electrons via ionization of the residual gas. The secondaries are accelerated by the electric potential and therefore will have the same energy as the signal electrons from β-decays by the time they arrive at the detector.

This talk will present investigations of radon-induced backgrounds during the recent commissioning measurement phase of the KATRIN main spectrometer and discuss the efficiency of counter measures.

This work was supported by the BMBF under grant no. 05A11VK3 and by the Helmholtz Association.