Faculty Host: Renee Fatemi

"Direct neutrino mass measurements: KATRIN and Project 8''



The only model-independent way to measure the neutrino's mass is the same way we measure the masses of many heavier things: by measuring the kinematics of a reaction and solving the energy-momentum balance. A uniquely-useful reaction for this is tritium beta decay, where the neutrino mass distorts the ~18.6 keV electron endpoint by a tiny, but possibly detectable, amount. I will discuss two experiments looking for this distortion: the large KATRIN spectrometer (now under construction) and the future Project 8 experiment, which proposes to detect microwave radiation from individual tritium decay electrons.