0000000000654106
AUTHOR
S. Görhardt
Commissioning of the vacuum system of the KATRIN Main Spectrometer
The KATRIN experiment will probe the neutrino mass by measuring the β-electron energy spectrum near the endpoint of tritium β-decay. An integral energy analysis will be performed by an electro-static spectrometer (``Main Spectrometer''), an ultra-high vacuum vessel with a length of 23.2 m, a volume of 1240 m[superscript 3], and a complex inner electrode system with about 120 000 individual parts. The strong magnetic field that guides the β-electrons is provided by super-conducting solenoids at both ends of the spectrometer. Its influence on turbo-molecular pumps and vacuum gauges had to be considered. A system consisting of 6 turbo-molecular pumps and 3 km of non-evaporable getter strips ha…
Improved Upper Limit on the Neutrino Mass from a Direct Kinematic Method by KATRIN
We report on the neutrino mass measurement result from the first four-week science run of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment KATRIN in spring 2019. Beta-decay electrons from a high-purity gaseous molecular tritium source are energy analyzed by a high-resolution MAC-E filter. A fit of the integrated electron spectrum over a narrow interval around the kinematic end point at 18.57 keV gives an effective neutrino mass square value of (−1.0−1.1+0.9) eV2. From this, we derive an upper limit of 1.1 eV (90% confidence level) on the absolute mass scale of neutrinos. This value coincides with the KATRIN sensitivity. It improves upon previous mass limits from kinematic measurements by almost a …
Impact of a cryogenic baffle system on the suppression of radon-induced background in the KATRIN Pre-Spectrometer
The KATRIN experiment will determine the effective electron anti-neutrino mass with a sensitivity of 200 meV/c2 at 90% CL. The energy analysis of tritium β-decay electrons will be performed by a tandem setup of electrostatic retarding spectrometers which have to be operated at very low background levels of <10−2 counts per second. This benchmark rate can be exceeded by background processes resulting from the emanation of single 219,220Rn atoms from the inner spectrometer surface and an array of non-evaporable getter strips used as main vacuum pump. Here we report on the impact of a cryogenic technique to reduce this radon-induced background in electrostatic spectrometers. It is based on ins…