HEP-Astro Seminar | Radioactivity and Radio Waves: Project 8 and the Hunt for the Neutrino Mass

Enrico Fermi's 1934 paper proposing the weak interaction suggested that we should try to measure the neutrino mass via the endpoints of nuclear beta decays. 87 years later, we are still trying to do it; the world's largest electrostatic spectrometer, KATRIN, recently showed that m < 0.8 eV---still far from the scale suggested by neutrino-oscillation mass splittings (0.05-0.008 eV). The Project 8 collaboration is using radio-frequency cyclotron radiation, rather than traditional spectrometers, to detect nuclear beta decay electrons (including, recently, a small-scale tritium endpoint measurement.) In this talk, I'll survey the current science of neutrino mass measurement and show how Project 8 is planning a campaign to study an atomic tritium source with 0.05 eV neutrino mass sensitivity.