Speaker
Description
The KATRIN (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino) experiment is designed to measure the effective neutrino mass using tritium beta decay. KATRIN has set the world's best limit on the neutrino mass ($m_\beta < 0.45,\mathrm{eV}$ at 90% CL) from the combined analysis of the first five measurement campaigns. Using the same dataset, KATRIN also published new constraints on eV-scale sterile neutrinos, covering a mass-squared range from a few $\mathrm{eV}^2$ to several hundred $\mathrm{eV}^2$, excluding mixing angles above a few percent.
With an endpoint of $18.6,\mathrm{keV}$, tritium enables searches for sterile neutrinos at the keV mass scale by measuring the full $\beta$ spectrum. However, the current KATRIN detector is not designed to handle the substantially higher count rates over this wide energy range. To address this, a faster detector, TRISTAN, will be installed in the KATRIN beamline, to search for keV-scale sterile neutrinos across the full $\beta$ spectrum with sensitivity to active-sterile mixing down to $10^{-6}$. TRISTAN, a multi-pixel detector based on silicon drift detector technology, is currently in production, with installation in the KATRIN beamline planned for 2026.
In this contribution, I will discuss recent progress in the TRISTAN detector development and the methods being implemented to analyze the full tritium $\beta$ spectrum
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