Impact of ADC non-linearities on the sensitivity to sterile keV neutrinos with a KATRIN-like experiment

Abstract

ADC non-linearities are a major systematic effect in the search for keV-scale sterile neutrinos with tritium $\beta$-decay experiments like KATRIN. They can significantly distort the spectral shape and thereby obscure the tiny kink-like signature of a sterile neutrino. In this work we demonstrate various mitigation techniques to reduce the impact of ADC non-linearities on the tritium $\beta$-decay spectrum to a level of $<$ ppm. The best results are achieved with a multi-pixel ($\ge 10^4$ pixels) detector using full waveform digitization. In this case, active-to-sterile mixing angles of the order of ${\sin }^2\theta =10^{-7}$ would be accessible from the viewpoint of ADC non-linearities. With purely peak-sensing ADCs a comparable sensitivity could be reached with highly linear ADCs, sufficient non-linearity corrections or by increasing the number of pixels to $\ge 10^5$.

20 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Sensitivity of Next-Generation Tritium Beta-Decay Experiments for keV-Scale Sterile Neutrinos
• Focal-plane detector system for the KATRIN experiment
• An X-ray Spectroscopic Search for Dark Matter in the Perseus Cluster with Suzaku
• Wavelet Approach to Search for Sterile Neutrinos in Tritium $\beta$-Decay Spectra
• A Suzaku Search for Dark Matter Emission Lines in the X-ray Brightest Galaxy Clusters

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Physics potential of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO)
• $\alpha$-event Characterization and Rejection in Point-Contact HPGe Detectors
• Development of a Silicon Drift Detector Array to Search for keV-scale Sterile Neutrinos with the KATRIN Experiment