Speaker
Description
The KATRIN experiment’s goal of directly determining the neutrino mass with unprecedented precision requires not only meticulous handling of large tritium quantities and a state-of-the-art spectrometer, but also a thorough understanding of all the systematic effects affecting the final neutrino mass analysis. The most dominant of these systematics stem from source-related effects, where the column density plays a vital role in determining the probability for energy loss of the electron prior to reaching the spectrometer.
Usually, the column density is monitored via an electron gun in the rear section of the KATRIN setup which is coupled to a Laser Driven Light Source (LDLS) as a continuous light source, allowing analysis of monoenergetic electrons interacting with the source gas. Starting with KNM10, additional column density measurements using the electron gun coupled to a laser operated in a pulsed mode were available. These introduced time-of-flight information, enabling novel analyses methods and provide an improved understanding of the systematic effects.
This work presents the analysis strategy for both the LDLS as well as laser based column density measurements.