Electron line shape and transmission function of the KATRIN monitor spectrometer

摘要

Knowledge of the neutrino mass is of particular interest in modern neutrino physics. Besides the neutrinoless double beta decay and cosmological observation information about the neutrino mass is obtained from single beta decay by observing the shape of the electron spectrum near the endpoint. The KATRIN β decay experiment aims to push the limit on the effective electron antineutrino mass down to 0.2 eV/c~2. To reach this sensitivity several systematic effects have to be under control. One of them is the fluctuations of the absolute energy scale, which therefore has to be continuously monitored at very high precision. This paper shortly describes KATRIN, the technique for continuous monitoring of the absolute energy scale and recent improvements in analysis of the monitoring data.