2025/12/22 by R. Ammendola, Ammendola, R., A. Apponi +129
Physics and Astronomy · Engineering · #Neutrino Physics Research #Muon and positron interactions and applications #Particle Detector Development and Performance
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.19437
The PTOLEMY project is prototyping a novel electromagnetic filter for high-precision β spectroscopy, with the ultimate and ambitious long-term goal of detecting the cosmic neutrino background through electron capture on tritium bound to graphene. Intermediate small-scale prototypes can achieve competitive sensitivity to the effective neutrino mass, even with reduced energy resolution. To reach an energy resolution better than \SI500meV at the tritium β-spectrum endpoint of \SI18.6keV, and accounting for all uncertainties in the filtering chain, the electrode voltage must be controlled at the level of a few parts per million and monitored in real time. In this work, we present the first results obtained in this effort, using a chain of commercial ultra-high-precision voltage references, read out by precision multimeters and a field mill device. The currently available precision on high voltage is, in the conservative case, as low as \SI0.2ppm per \SI1kV single board and \lesssim \SI50mV over the \SI10kV series, presently limited by field mill read-out noise. However, assuming uncorrelated Gaussian noise extrapolation, the real precision could in principle be as low as \SI0.05ppm over \SI20kV.