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Published April 2016 | public
Journal Article

Superconducting Detectors for Neutrino Mass Measurement

Abstract

Assessing the absolute neutrino mass scale is one of the major challenges in particle physics and astrophysics nowadays. A powerful tool to directly estimate the effective electron neutrino mass consists in the calorimetric measurement of the energy released within a nuclear beta decay. The progresses made over the last few decades on low-temperature detector technologies have permitted to design experiments with expected sensitivities on the neutrino mass below 1 eV/c^2 with the calorimetric approach. Despite the remarkable performances in both energy (~ eV at keV) and time resolutions (∼1 μs) on the single channel, a large number of detectors working in parallel is required to reach a sub-eV sensitivity. Microwave frequency-domain readout provides a powerful technique to read out large arrays of low-temperature detectors, such as transition edge sensors (TESs) or microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs). In this way, the multiplex factor is only limited by the bandwidth of the available commercial fast digitizers. The microwave multiplexing system will be used to read out the TES array of the HOLMES experiment, which is made of 1000 ^(163)Ho-implanted microcalorimeters. HOLMES is a new experiment that aims to measure the electron neutrino mass by means of the electron capture decay of ^(163)Ho with an expected sensitivity of the order of the eV/c^2.

Additional Information

© 2016 IEEE. Manuscript received September 8, 2015; accepted March 5, 2016. Date of publication March 14, 2016; date of current version May 11, 2016. The HOLMES experiment was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under ERC Grant Agreement 340321. The work on microwave kinetic inductance detectors was supported by the Fondazione Cariplo through the project "Development of Microresonator Detectors for Neutrino Physics" under Grant 2010-2351. The authors would like to thank the INFN, for the MARE project, and the NIST Innovations in Measurement Science Program, for the TES detector development.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023