KATRIN

ABOUT KATRIN

• KATRIN is a very large scale tritium-beta-decay experiment aimed at determining the mass of the neutrino.
• It is a German acronym (Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment) for an undertaking to measure the mass of the electron antineutrino with sub-eV precision by examining the spectrum of electrons emitted from the beta decay of tritium.
• To answer one of the most fundamental and important open questions in modern particle physics and cosmology, “What is the mass of neutrinos?” , the KATRIN Experiment was designed and built by an international collaboration at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in southwest Germany.
• KATRIN measures the neutrino mass in a model-independent way via ultrahigh precision measurements of the kinematics of electrons from beta-decay.
• The experiment began running tests in October 2016.

About Neutrinos:

• Neutrinos are the most abundant massive elementary particles in nature. Due to their minimalistic properties they are key particles for understanding physics on the smallest scale (elementary particle physics) up to the largest scale – the universe (cosmology).
• Neutrinos are the only elementary particles of matter, which do not carry electrical or strong charge and thus are blind to the electromagnetic and the strong interaction and cannot be bound.
• In the context of particle physics they participate only in the weak interaction. This made neutrinos the most prominent candidate to explore with them the properties of the weak interaction.

Prelims Question

Q. What is KATRIN which was in news recently?
a)Neutrino experiment
b)Atomic power plant
c)Genetically modified organism
d)Radio Telescope

Answer to the Prelims Question