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SYWS: Fundamentale Wechselwirkungen und ihre Symmetrien

SYWS 2: Fundamental Interactions and their Symmetries II

SYWS 2.4: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 17:30–18:00, 1A/B/C

Determination of the neutrino mass — •Christian Weinheimer — Institut für Kernphysik, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

The recent evidences for neutrino oscillation from atmospheric, solar, reactor and accelerator neutrinos prove, that neutrinos of different flavour are non-trivial mixtures of non-zero neutrino mass eigenstates. Oscillation experiments determine differences between squared neutrino masses, but not the masses, which are very important for particle physics as well as for cosmology and astrophysics.

Information on the absolute neutrino mass scale is obtained from astrophysical observations, from the search for the neutrinoless double beta decay and directly from the investigation of the endpoint region of the tritium or rhenium single beta decay.

The cosmological method and the status of the double beta decay experiments will be discussed. The KATRIN experiment, which is currently being set up by an international collaboration at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe will be presented. By investigating the tritium beta decay spectrum KATRIN will improve the direct neutrino mass sensitivity by one order of magnitude to 0.2 eV allowing to distinguish between hierarchical and quasi-degenerate neutrino mass scenarios and to check the cosmological relevant neutrino mass range.