Impact of ADC non-linearities on the sensitivity to sterile keV neutrinos with a KATRIN-like experiment

Journal Article · Tue Dec 13 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2016.12.015· OSTI ID:1462838

Dolde, Kai ^[1]; Mertens, Susanne ^[2]; Radford, David C.  ^[3]; Bode, Tobias ^[4]; Huber, Anton ^[1]; Korzeczek, Marc ^[1]; Lasserre, Thierry ^[5]; Slezak, Martin ^[4]

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1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe (Germany)
2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe (Germany); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich (Germany); Technische Univ. Munchen, Garching (Germany)
3. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
4. Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich (Germany)
5. Institut sur la recherche des loins fondamentales de l'Univers, Paris (France)

Here, 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 (≥ 10⁴ pixels) detector using full waveform digitization. In this case, active-to-sterile mixing angles of the order of sin²θ = 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 ≥ 10⁵.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1462838
• Journal Information: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Vol. 848, Issue C; ISSN 0168-9002
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS
Sterile neutrinos
ADC non-linearities
Tritium β-decay
KATRIN