Dr. Gianpiero Mangano, Neutrino Physics with the PTOLEMY project

Thursday 4 Apr 2019, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

0M03 (Dipartimento di Fisica, M. S. Angelo)

The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic
Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only
one conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded
in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang.
The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this
detector and to validate with direct measurements that the
non-neutrino backgrounds are below the expected signal from the Big Bang.
In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the
experiment and its physics goals.
In particular, we mainly address three issues.
First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino
mass scale.
We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via
neutrino
capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy
resolution of the apparatus.
Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range,
coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in
view of neutrino oscillation anomalies.
This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum,
and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing
the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.