Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 60: Methods in Astroparticle Physics III

T 60.1: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 18. März 2026, 16:15–16:30, KS 00.004

Test setup for a potential electron tagger at KATRIN — •Patrick Unkhoff, Volker Hannen, Christian Huhmann, and Christian Weinheimer for the KATRIN collaboration — Universität Münster

The neutrino mass experiment KATRIN has effectively collected 1000 days of tritium beta decay data, allowing to achive 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 a sub-eV energy resolution. This may be possible through direct time-of-flight spectroscopy of beta-decay electrons. This approach requires detecting the electron start time when entering the KATRIN spectrometer with minimal change of its energy. In this talk, the concept of electron tagging using the image current technique is discussed. Here, the electrons are detected by measuring tiny currents induced by the motion of passing electrons on a nearby electrode structure. A cryogenic test setup has recently been developed at the University Münster to investigate the feasibility of this method and will be presented in this talk. This work is supported by BMFTR under contract number 05A23PMA.

Keywords: neutrino mass; KATRIN++; image current; electrostatics; cryogenic