The KATRIN sensitivity to the neutrino mass and to right-handed currents in beta decay

Abstract

The aim of the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment KATRIN is the determination of the absolute neutrino mass scale down to 0.2 eV, with essentially smaller model dependence than from cosmology and neutrinoless double beta decay. For this purpose, the integral electron energy spectrum is measured close to the endpoint of molecular tritium beta decay. The endpoint, together with the neutrino mass, should be fitted from the KATRIN data as a free parameter. The right-handed couplings change the electron energy spectrum close to the endpoint, therefore they have some effect also to the precise neutrino mass determination. The statistical calculations show that, using the endpoint as a free parameter, the unaccounted right-handed couplings constrained by many beta decay experiments can change the fitted neutrino mass value, relative to the true neutrino mass, by not larger than about 5-10 %. Using, incorrectly, the endpoint as a fixed input parameter, the above change of the neutrino mass can be much larger, order of 100 %, and for some cases it can happen that for large true neutrino mass value the fitted neutrino mass squared is negative. Publications using fixed endpoint and presenting large right-handed coupling effects to the neutrino mass determination are not relevant for the KATRIN experiment.

arXiv comment4 pages, 2 figures, 12 references

References in corpus (7)

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• Penning traps as a versatile tool for precise experiments in fundamental physics
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Current Direct Neutrino Mass Experiments
• Constraining $M_{\nu }$ with the Bispectrum I: Breaking Parameter Degeneracies
• Constraining $M_{\nu }$ with the Bispectrum II: The Total Information Content of the Galaxy Bispectrum
• Proton-proton fusion and tritium $\beta$-decay from lattice quantum chromodynamics
• Cosmology in the era of Euclid and the Square Kilometre Array
• Nuclear matrix elements from lattice QCD for electroweak and beyond-Standard-Model processes
• How to add massive neutrinos to your $\Lambda$CDM simulation -- extending cosmology rescaling algorithms
• Sterile neutrinos and right-handed currents in KATRIN
• KATRIN: Status and Prospects for the Neutrino Mass and Beyond
• Cosmological constraints from galaxy clustering in the presence of massive neutrinos
• Direct Neutrino Mass Experiments and Exotic Charged Current Interactions
• Statistical Analysis of future Neutrino Mass Experiments including Neutrino-less Double Beta Decay
• Analysis of KATRIN data using Bayesian inference
• Statistical sensitivity on right-handed currents in presence of eV scale sterile neutrinos with KATRIN
• First constraints on general neutrino interactions based on KATRIN data