Over the last few decades, neutrino oscillation experiments have provided compelling evidence that neutrinos are not the massless particles that were once assumed. We now know the splittings between the three neutrino mass eigenstates, but the absolute mass scale has remained elusive. In this talk, I will discuss the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN), which will use the kinematics of tritium beta decay to probe the neutrino mass in a nearly model-independent way. To achieve a projected sensitivity of 0.2 eV at the 90% confidence level, KATRIN will use a windowless, gaseous tritium source and a large magnetic adiabatic collimation-electrostatic filter. Final construction, simulation and piece-by-piece commissioning are proceeding apace for a data-taking start scheduled for late 2016. I will discuss the status of the experiment, the outlook for its neutrino-mass measurement and for more exotic physics searches, and some of the technical and scientific questions that have arisen along the way.

Argonne Physics Division Seminar Schedule