Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 27: Poster Session
HK 27.21: Poster
Mittwoch, 18. März 2026, 16:15–18:30, Redoutensaal
Thermal triggering of superconducting nanowires for a potential electron tagger at KATRIN — •Christian Gönner1,2, Juan Navarro Arenas1, Carsten Schuck1, and Christian Weinheimer2 — 1Department for Quantum Technology, University of Muenster, Germany — 2Institute for Nuclear Physics, University of Muenster, Germany
The neutrino mass experiment KATRIN has effectively collected 1000 days of tritium beta decay data, allowing to achieve a sensitivity for an upper limit on the electron neutrino mass of m < 300 meV at 90% C.L.. After searching for sterile keV neutrinos with the TRISTAN detector at KATRIN a potential next generation experiment labeled KATRIN++ aims to go beyond this limit and probe the inverted mass ordering range down to neutrino masses m < 50 meV. Besides the necessary development of an atomic tritium source, achieving the required sensitivity requires a new differential method with sub-eV energy resolution. This may be possible through direct time-of-flight spectroscopy of beta-decay electrons. This approach requires detection of electrons when entering the KATRIN spectrometer with minimal change of its energy. The feasibility of a detector based on superconducting nanowires as is already used in single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) is investigated. It could offer the required sensitivity and timing resolution by exploiting the disruption of the superconducting state, while a 2D membrane interaction medium for beta electrons, yielding quasi-discrete excitations to detect via the superconducting nanowires. This work is supported by BMFTR under contract number 05A23PMA.
Keywords: Neutrinos; KATRIN; SNSPD