Speaker
Description
After six years of successful operations, the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment has concluded its first phase of endpoint measurements of the tritium beta spectrum. Combining an intense windowless, gaseous tritium source with a precise integrating energy filter, KATRIN has set the world’s best direct limit on the absolute mass scale of the neutrino: $m_\beta < 0.45~eV$ (90% C.L.), based on approximately a sixth of its final data set. In this poster, I will explain how KATRIN derives neutrino-mass information from the kinematics of tritium beta decay, describe recent results, and give a sense of our ongoing analysis of the full dataset. I will also discuss KATRIN’s next planned phase of operations, which will measure the tritium beta spectrum beyond the endpoint region to improve our search for beyond-Standard-Model phenomena.