MARE, Microcalorimeter Arrays for a Rhenium Experiment: A detector overview
Section snippets
The physics case
Single beta decay is the only laboratory measurement that can determine the neutrino mass scale in a fully model independent approach. Neutrino mass is extracted by studying the shape of the beta spectrum in a region close to the end point Q. The parameter which is actually inferred from the measurement is , where are the elements of the first row of the neutrino mixing matrix. Presently, the upper bound on is 2.2 eV, provided by the MAINZ and TROITZK [1] experiments,
MARE-1: a 2 eV neutrino mass experiment
The specific beta activity of natural rhenium (of the order of 1 Bq/mg), is ideally tailored to low temperature microcalorimeters, detectors consisting of a Re-based energy absorber and a sensitive thermometer which converts the temperature increase induced by a single beta decay into an electrical signal. In an experiment based on microcalorimeter arrays, the statistical sensitivity to neutrino mass scales as . Large progresses in sensitivities can be attained acting mainly on
Technologies for MARE-2
The sensitivity goal of 0.2 eV envisaged for MARE-2 requires a further increase of statistics up to beta events, with a moderate improvement of the energy resolution. In order to keep the total numbers of elements at a reasonable level (of the order of 50000–100 000), a substantial increase of the single element mass is foreseen (up to 1–5 mg). This requires that be reduced down to 1–, in order to keep the pile-up fraction around . This very demanding performance may require new
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