2024/09/10 by Christian Forstner, Korbinian Urban, Forstner, Christian +17
Engineering · #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Silicon and Solar Cell Technologies #Thin-Film Transistor Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.08901
openalex publication_date 2024/09/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Sterile neutrinos are a minimal extension of the Standard Model of particle physics and a promising candidate for dark matter if their mass is in the keV-range. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN), equipped with a novel multi-pixel silicon drift detector array, the TRISTAN detector, will be capable of searching for these keV-scale sterile neutrinos by investigating the kinematics of the tritium β-decay. This measurement will be performed after the completion of the neutrino mass measurement campaign. To detect a sterile neutrino signal with a high sensitivity, a profound understanding of the detector response is required. In this work, we report on the characterization of a 7-pixel TRISTAN prototype detector with a laser system. We present the experimental results obtained in high-resolution scans of the detector surface with a focused laser beam and demonstrate how the charge collection and the timing of the signals generated in the detector is related to the detector geometry. A comparison of the experimental data with simulations shows a good agreement.