Seminar in Physics
SPRING 2021
SPRING 2021
Spring 2021, George Mason University
[Jan 25, 2021 - May 10, 2021]
Online
Friday 15:30-16:45
Fereshte Ghahari Kermani & Erdal Yiğit
Carnegie Mellon University
The Unbearable Lightness of Neutrinos
Abstract:
Ever since it was first hypothesized 89 years ago, the strange and ghostly particle called the neutrino has mystified and inspired particle and nuclear physicists. After decades of experimental and theoretical work, we have now firmly established that neutrinos have mass, and yet their absolute mass scale remains unknown. Now, after many years of painstaking design, construction, and commissioning work, the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN) has recently improved the world's best direct neutrino-mass sensitivity by a factor of two, with more improvements to come. I will give a tour of KATRIN's 70-m beamline, share some of our adventures with engineering challenges and novel backgrounds, describe our spectral fits and systematic uncertainties, and show a glimpse of KATRIN's future.