Apr 13 – 16, 2026
KIT Campus South
Europe/Berlin timezone

Test setup for a potential electron tagger at KATRIN

Apr 13, 2026, 5:21 PM
2m
Gaede Foyer (KIT Campus South)

Gaede Foyer

KIT Campus South

2nd floor (in front of Gaede-Lecture theater) Physikflachbau Building 30.22 Engesserstraße 7 76131 Karlsruhe
Poster Posters

Speaker

Patrick Alexander Unkhoff (University Münster)

Description

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.

Collaboration or Other Affiliation KATRIN

Author

Patrick Alexander Unkhoff (University Münster)

Co-authors

Volker Hannen (University of Münster) Christian Huhmann (University of Münster) Christian Weinheimer (University of Muenster)

Presentation materials