Speaker
Dr
Loredana gastaldo
(Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University)
Description
The Electron Capture in Ho-163 (ECHo) experiment is designed to investigate the electron neutrino mass with sub-eV sensitivity by the analysis of the electron capture energy spectrum of Ho-163. The sensitivity on the electron neutrino mass is crucially related to the energy available for the decay 𝑄 = 2833(30𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡)(15𝑠𝑦𝑠) eV, which has been precisely determined by the ECHo collaboration. Accordingly, a sensitivity below 10 eV at the end of the present phase of the experiment, ECHo-1k, is expected. During this phase about 1 kBq of high purity Ho-163 source will be implanted in arrays of low temperature metallic magnetic calorimeters operated in a reduced background environment.
The goals of the current phase are the precise characterization of the parameters describing the spectrum, optimization of the processes needed to enclose high purity Ho-163 into the pixels of the detector arrays as well as the identification and reduction of the background.
These results will pave the way to a future phase of the experiment, where activities of the order of MBq will be used. With this second phase we could approach sub-eV sensitivity on the electron neutrino mass. Furthermore, the high statistics and high resolution measurement of the Ho-163 electron capture spectrum will allow for the investigation of the existence of eV sterile neutrinos and keV-scale sterile neutrinos up to a masses close to the 𝑄-value energy. In this contribution, a general overview of the ECHo experiment is presented and the current status as well as the future perspectives are discussed.
Primary author
Dr
Loredana gastaldo
(Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University)
