Search

Sterile neutrinos appear in minimal extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. If their mass is in the keV regime, they are viable dark matter candidates. One way to search for sterile neutrinos in a laboratory-based experiment is via the analysis of β-decay spectra, where the new neutrino mass eigenstate would manifest itself as a kink-like distortion of the β-decay spectrum. The objective of the TRISTAN project is to extend the KATRIN setup with a new multi-pixel silicon drift detector system to search for a keV-scale sterile neutrino signal. In this paper we describe the requirements of such a new detector, and present first characterization measurement results obtained with a 7 pixel prototype system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ADC non-linearities are a major systematic effect in the search for keV-scale sterile neutrinos with tritium β -decay experiments like KATRIN. They can significantly distort the spectral shape and thereby obscure the tiny kink-like signature of a sterile neutrino. In this work we demonstrate various mitigation techniques to reduce the impact of ADC non-linearities on the tritium β -decay spectrum to a level of < ppm . The best results are achieved with a multi-pixel ( ≥ 10 4 pixels) detector using full waveform digitization. In this case, active-to-sterile mixing angles of the order of sin 2 θ = 10 − 7 would be accessible from the viewpoint of ADC non-linearities. With purely peak-sensing ADCs a comparable sensitivity could be reached with highly linear ADCs, sufficient non-linearity corrections or by increasing the number of pixels to ≥ 10 5 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]