Direct measurements of neutrino mass
Name
2102.00594.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
5.04 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a30e0adebfd541a121c1eb76d00d6ba7
Author(s)
Formaggio, Joseph A
de Gouvêa, André Luiz C
Robertson, RG Hamish
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Physics Reports
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Formaggio, Joseph A, de Gouvêa, André Luiz C and Robertson, RG Hamish. 2021. "Direct measurements of neutrino mass." Physics Reports, 914.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. The turn of the 21st century witnessed a sudden shift in our fundamental understanding of particle physics. While the minimal Standard Model predicts that neutrino masses are exactly zero, the discovery of neutrino oscillations proved the Standard Model wrong. Neutrino oscillation measurements, however, shed light neither on the scale of neutrino masses, nor on the mechanism by which those are generated. The neutrino mass scale is most directly accessed by studying the energy spectrum generated by beta decay or electron capture — a technique dating back to Enrico Fermi's formulation of radioactive decay. In this Article, we review the methods and techniques – both past and present – aimed at measuring neutrino masses kinematically. We focus on recent experimental developments that have emerged in the past decade, overview the spectral refinements that are essential in the treatment of the most sensitive experiments, and give a simple yet effective protocol for estimating the sensitivity. Finally, we provide an outlook of what future experiments might be able to achieve.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PHYSREP.2021.02.002
