Speaker
Description
The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment aims to make a precision mass measurement of the neutrino by leveraging the kinematics of tritium beta decay. High-precision spectroscopy is performed near the endpoint at 18.6 keV by employing a windowless gaseous tritium source combined with a MAC-E filter technique as an electron spectrometer. Being complementary to the search for neutrinoless double beta decay and the analysis of cosmological data, this direct neutrino mass measurement allows a model-independent way of approaching the neutrino mass scale to a design mass sensitivity of 0.2eV (90 % C.L.).
The required sensitivity demands high stability of hardware components, a precise understanding of systematic effects, and a low background. From early 2019, KATRIN is taking highly statistical tritium data. The 2019 data already provide a sub-eV sensitivity and a neutrino mass limit. In the meanwhile, significantly more data was recorded in a new spectrometer configuration. In addition to presenting the latest results, the current status of the experiment and the ongoing analyses will be reported.
