Mainz 2022 – scientific programme
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 69: Instrumentation XIX
HK 69.3: Talk
Thursday, March 31, 2022, 16:30–16:45, HK-H5
aTEF: Background reduction at KATRIN via an active transverse energy filter — •Kevin Gauda1, Volker Hannen1, Alexey Lokhov1, Hans-Werner Ortjohann1, Wolfram Pernice2, Richard Salomon1, Sonja Schneidewind1, Maik Stappers2, and Christian Weinheimer1 — 1Institut für Kernphysik, Universität Münster, Germany — 2Physikalisches Institut, Universität Münster, Germany
The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) aims at the direct measurement of the electron antineutrino mass with 0.2 eV/c2 sensitivity from precision spectroscopy of the tritium beta decay. The analysis of its first two science runs yields a new upper limit of mν< 0.8 eV (90 % C.L.).
Even in the shifted-analysis-plane (SAP) mode it is required to further lower the background rate to reach the target sensitivity. The background rate is dominated by electrons originating from ionisation of highly-excited (Rydberg) atoms produced by α-decays in the spectrometer walls. Thus, they cannot be distinguished from the signal electrons by energy but they possess much smaller angles w.r.t. the beam axis and, thus, much smaller cyclotron radii in the magnetic fields of KATRIN. The aTEF idea is to construct a detector by microstructuring that is mainly sensitive to the signal electrons because of their larger cyclotron radii. Investigations of first prototypes based on microstructured silicon PIN detectors are presented in this talk.
The work of the authors for KATRIN is supported by BMBF under contract number 05A20PMA.