Overview of the 70 m long KATRIN setup with its major components a) windowless gaseous tritium source, b) pumping section, and c) electrostatic spectrometers and focal plane detector.
Apart from photons, the fundamental quanta of light, neutrinos are the most abundant elementary particles in the universe. As they possess a small non-zero mass, these "light-weights of the universe" play a key role in cosmology and particle physics. The most precise scale for neutrinos in the world is the international experiment "KATRIN" at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in which scientists of the University of Münster are also involved. With this experiment, the scientists have now succeeded in measuring the mass of the neutrinos with unprecedented precision. "The fact that it took KATRIN only a few weeks to provide a world-leading sensitivity and to improve on the multi-year campaigns of the predecessor experiments by a factor of 2 demonstrates the extraordinary high potential of our project," says Prof. Christian Weinheimer from the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Münster University. He is one of the two long-term co-spokespersons of the KATRIN experiment. Christian Weinheimer and his research group have made significant contributions to the KATRIN experiment in recent years.
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