Neutrino mass limit from tritium β decay

By E. Otten, C. Weinheimer. 2008

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This paper reviews recent experiments on tritium β-spectroscopy searching for the absolute value of the electron neutrino mass m(νe). By the use of dedicated electrostatic filters with high acceptance and resolution, the uncertainty on the observable m2(νe) has been pushed down to about 3 eV2. The new upper limit of the mass is m(νe) < 2 eV at 95% C.L. In view of erroneous and unphysical mass results obtained by some earlier experiments in β decay, particular attention is paid to systematic effects. The mass limit is discussed in the context of current neutrino research in particle- and astrophysics. A preview is given of the next generation of β-spectroscopy experiments currently under development and construction; they aim at lowering the m2(νe) uncertainty by another factor of 100, reaching a sensitivity limit m(νe) < 0.2 eV.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/806d74fb4e14bc3b9f8c1264fad7c3977d3d1c14

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Citations in the corpus

Solar Neutrinos: Status and Prospects (2012, background): “36 4.1 Oscillation Basics: The Vacuum Case The current laboratory (tritium β decay) limit on the ν̄e mass is 2.3 eV, though an effort is underway to substantially improve this bound (KATRIN Collaboration, J. Angrik et al. 2004; Otten & Weinheimer 2008).”
Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, background): “where T ′ e = Ee − me is the intrinsic kinetic energy of the outgoing electron, F(Z, Ee) denotes the Fermi function, |M|2 stands for the dimensionless contribution of relevant nuclear matrix elements [667], and θC ' 13◦ is the Cabibbo angle.”
Current Direct Neutrino Mass Experiments (2013, methodology): “the neutrino mass are presented in subchapter 5. This article closes with a conclusion in subchapter 6. For a more detailed and complete overview on this subject we would like to refer to the reviews [17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24]. 2 -decay and -mass According Fermi’s Golden Rule the decay rate for a -dec”
Penning traps as a versatile tool for precise experiments in fundamental physics (2009, background): “ of degeneracy in the double-capture process. The factor of degeneracy Δ, shown in the last column, is a value to date and needs considerable improvement in precision. Qεε in column 2 were taken from [37]. εε- transition Qεε (keV) E = B1+B2 (keV) Δ = Qεε-E (keV) 152Gd+152Sm 54.6(12) 56.26(K+L 1) 54.”
Global constraints on absolute neutrino masses and their ordering (2017, background): “The results obtained in the previous Section have implications for the discovery potential of β-decay searches, such as the experiment KATRIN [105–107], designed to probe the range mβ ∼ 0.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS‐III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the large‐scale two‐point correlation function (2012, methodology): “Future experiments like KATRIN are expected to improve these bounds by an order of magnitude (Otten & Weinheimer 2008).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the full shape of the clustering wedges in the data release 10 and 11 galaxy samples (2013, background): “However, absolute neutrino mass measurements are more difficult to perform in the laboratory (Lobashev 2003; Eitel 2005; Otten & Weinheimer 2008) and current constraints are weaker than those imposed by cosmological observations such as CMB and LSS measurements (Lesgourgues & Pastor 2012).”