Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 8: Neutrinophysik V
T 8.5: Group Report
Monday, March 19, 2018, 17:05–17:25, Z6 - HS 0.001
TRISTAN: the search for keV-scale sterile neutrinos in the tritium beta decay with KATRIN — •Konrad Altenmüller for the KATRIN collaboration — Technische Universität München
The TRISTAN project is an extension of the KATRIN experiment to search for the signature of keV-scale sterile neutrinos in the tritium beta decay spectrum. To investigate the effective neutrino mass KATRIN does an integral measurement of the tritium spectrum close to the end point of 18.6 keV. For this purpose an electromagnetic filter is used that allows only electrons above a certain energy threshold, i.e. a tiny fraction of all electrons emerged from the tritium, to reach the detector, where they are counted. This talk will give an overview on TRISTAN, which will measure the entire tritium spectrum and is thus confronted with much higher count rates than KATRIN. For a first measurement in 2018 – TRISTAN phase-0 – the tritium spectrum will be scanned down to low electron energies without any hardware change, but with a lowered source strength to not exceed the detector’s rate constraints. For TRISTAN phase-1 the KATRIN setup will be modified after the neutrino mass measurements are finished to conduct a differential and integral measurement of the entire tritium spectrum. The current detector will be replaced by a novel 4000-pixel silicon drift detector system that has an outstanding energy resolution of a few hundred eV and can handle rates up to 109 counts per second as they occur when the filter is turned off. Prototype detectors were successfully tested and first tritium data was taken at the Troitsk ν-mass spectrometer to study systematics and develop analysis methods.