2022/07/13 by Aker, M., Batzler, D., Beglarian, A. +128 · 1 citation
#FOS: Physical sciences #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.06337
In this work we present a keV-scale sterile-neutrino search with the first tritium data of the KATRIN experiment, acquired in the commissioning run in 2018. KATRIN performs a spectroscopic measurement of the tritium β-decay spectrum with the main goal of directly determining the effective electron anti-neutrino mass. During this commissioning phase a lower tritium activity facilitated the search for sterile neutrinos with a mass of up to 1.6 keV. We do not find a signal and set an exclusion limit on the sterile-to-active mixing amplitude of down to sin2θ< 5⋅10-4 (95 % C.L.), improving current laboratory-based bounds in the sterile-neutrino mass range between 0.1 and 1.0 keV.