Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 45: Neutrino Physics III
T 45.2: Talk
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 16:30–16:45, AudiMax
Principal Component Analysis for Pile-up Event Detection in the ECHo Experiment — •Domenic Klumpp for the ECHo collaboration — Kirchhof Institut of Physics, Heidelberg, Germany
The ECHo (Electron Capture in Holmium-163) experiment uses metallic magnetic calorimeter (MMC) detectors to calorimetrically measure the electron capture spectrum of Ho-163 with the goal of determining the effective electron neutrino mass via the analysis of the endpoint region. In the data analysis, a significant challenge is the identification and rejection of pile-up events for which the time interval is of the order or smaller than the rise time of the pulse signal. Those events represent an intrinsic background distorting the spectrum and therefore affecting the accuracy of neutrino mass determination. We present an approach using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify pile-up events. Simulated events preserving the shape and noise of real events have been generated according to the shape of the Ho-163 spectrum, including pile-up events to test the developed algorithms. For the ECHo-LE experiment the unresolved pile up fraction, given as product of the pixel activity times the time resolution, should be kept below 10−6, which for an activity of 10 Bq per pixel, implies a time resolution of 100 ns. We present the preliminary results obtained with the simulated data and discuss the implication of then in respect to the requirements for ECHo-LE.
Keywords: Data Analysis; Metallic Magnetic Calorimeter; low temperature detectors; Principal Component Analysis