Direct neutrino-mass measurement based on 259 days of KATRIN data

Abstract

That neutrinos carry a nonvanishing rest mass is evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. Their absolute mass holds relevance in fields from particle physics to cosmology. We report on the search for the effective electron antineutrino mass with the KATRIN experiment. KATRIN performs precision spectroscopy of the tritium β-decay close to the kinematic endpoint. On the basis of the first five measurement campaigns, we derived a best-fit value of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msubsup> <mml:mi>m</mml:mi> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msubsup> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:msubsup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>0.14</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.15</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.13</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msubsup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> eV 2 , resulting in an upper limit of m ν &lt; 0.45 eV at 90% confidence level. Stemming from 36 million electrons collected in 259 measurement days, a substantial reduction of the background level, and improved systematic uncertainties, this result tightens KATRIN’s previous bound by a factor of almost two.