0000000001164837
AUTHOR
T. Lasserre
Axion search with BabyIAXO in view of IAXO
Axions are a natural consequence of the Peccei-Quinn mechanism, the most compelling solution to the strong-CP problem. Similar axion-like particles (ALPs) also appear in a number of possible extensions of the Standard Model, notably in string theories. Both axions and ALPs are very well motivated candidates for Dark Matter, and in addition, they would be copiously produced at the sun's core. A relevant effort during the last decade has been the CAST experiment at CERN, the most sensitive axion helioscope to-date. The International Axion Observatory (IAXO) is a large-scale 4th generation helioscope. As its primary physics goal, IAXO will look for solar axions or ALPs with a signal to backgro…
Calibration of high voltages at the ppm level by the difference of $$^{83{\mathrm{m}}}$$ 83m Kr conversion electron lines at the KATRIN experiment
The neutrino mass experiment KATRIN requires a stability of 3 ppm for the retarding potential at − 18.6 kV of the main spectrometer. To monitor the stability, two custom-made ultra-precise high-voltage dividers were developed and built in cooperation with the German national metrology institute Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). Until now, regular absolute calibration of the voltage dividers required bringing the equipment to the specialised metrology laboratory. Here we present a new method based on measuring the energy difference of two $$^{83{\mathrm{m}}}$$ 83m Kr conversion electron lines with the KATRIN setup, which was demonstrated during KATRIN’s commissioning measurements …
The $^{144}$Ce source for SOX
International audience; The SOX (Short distance neutrino Oscillations with BoreXino) project aims at testing the light sterile neutrino hypothesis. To do so, two artificials sources of antineutrinos and neutrinos respectively will be consecutively deployed at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in close vicinity to Borexino, a large liquid scintillator detector. This document reports on the source production and transportation. The source should exhibit a long lifetime and a high decay energy, a requirement fullfilled by the (144)Ce-(144)Pr pair at secular equilibrium. It will be produced at FSUE “Mayak” PA using spent nuclear fuel. It will then be shielded and packed according t…
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 …
Gamma-induced background in the KATRIN main spectrometer
The KATRIN experiment aims to measure the effective electron antineutrino mass $$m_{\overline{\nu }_e}$$ mν¯e with a sensitivity of $${0.2}\,{\hbox {eV}/\hbox {c}^2}$$ 0.2eV/c2 using a gaseous tritium source combined with the MAC-E filter technique. A low background rate is crucial to achieving the proposed sensitivity, and dedicated measurements have been performed to study possible sources of background electrons. In this work, we test the hypothesis that gamma radiation from external radioactive sources significantly increases the rate of background events created in the main spectrometer (MS) and observed in the focal-plane detector. Using detailed simulations of the gamma flux in the e…
Measurement of θ13 in Double Chooz using neutron captures on hydrogen with novel background rejection techniques
The Double Chooz collaboration presents a measurement of the neutrino mixing angle θ[subscript 13] using reactor [bar over ν[subscript e]] observed via the inverse beta decay reaction in which the neutron is captured on hydrogen. This measurement is based on 462.72 live days data, approximately twice as much data as in the previous such analysis, collected with a detector positioned at an average distance of 1050 m from two reactor cores. Several novel techniques have been developed to achieve significant reductions of the backgrounds and systematic uncertainties. Accidental coincidences, the dominant background in this analysis, are suppressed by more than an order of magnitude with respec…