Speaker
Description
The KATRIN experiment at KIT Campus North aims to determine the neutrino mass with unpresedented sensitivity by measuring the shape of the energy spectrum of electrons from tritium-beta-decay close to the spectral endpoint. The 70-m-long setup includes a gaseous window-less tritium source, a beamline with differential and cryogenic pumping and a spectrometer section with two electro-static high-pass filters, so-called MAC-E-filters. The technically challenging setup includes ultra-high vacuum, superconducting magnets, cryogenics, tritium handling, precision high voltage, solid-state detectors, tritium processing, as well as many different calibration and monitoring techniques.
Funded by the ExIni project RIRO (Reasearch Infrastructure in Research-Oriented teaching) at KIT, several aspects of the KATRIN-related technologies have been made available to physics master studends in various lab course experiments.
In the first project a muon telescope with several square meters of plastic scintillator have been installed above and below the 10-m-diameter main spectrometer, allowing to look for correlations between throughgoing muons and background in KATRIN.
The second projects involves the operation of a scaled-down (1:20) complete MAC-E filter with implanted Kr-83m and tritium sources. This experiment allows the measurement of the integral energy spectrum of both sources by varying the retarding voltage of the spectrometer and counting the electrons with a 7-pixel silicon drift detector.
The third project offers a 1-week lab course introducing varios spectrometric techniques (Laser Raman and IR spectroscopy) used at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) to determine the concentration of hydrogen isotopologues in a gas mixture and measurements with the monitor spectrometer of the KATRIN experiment.
Up to now, the RIRO funded projects at KATRIN led to five bachelor theses and one master thesis.
