German experiment to measure neutrino mass begins

International Business Times : On 14 October, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany turned on the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment. The €60 million ($66 million) facility houses a 220 ton spectrometer that will be used for the next five years to attempt to measure the exact mass of neutrinos. In the standard model of particle physics, neutrinos were predicted to be massless; however, the discovery that neutrinos have different flavors and oscillate between them suggests that the particles do have mass. Whereas electrons have a mass of 511 000 eV, neutrinos may have a mass of just 2 eV. KATRIN, which has a sensitivity of 0.2 eV, is designed to find a precise measurement of neutrino mass by studying the particles that are released by the decay of tritium atoms. Guido Drexlin, one of KATRIN’s spokespersons, says that the research team hopes to have clear data to present as early as sometime next year.