Speaker
Description
The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment aims to determine the effective electron anti-neutrino mass with a sensitivity down to 0.2 eV/c$^2$ (90% CL) through spectroscopy of gaseous tritium beta-decay in the endpoint region. This challenging goal can only be reached through a precise examination of all systematic effects of the experiment. One of these effects is caused by a plasma in the high luminous windowless gaseous tritium source. The plasma is generated by beta-decay, subsequent partial ionization of the surrounding tritium gas. It produces an ab initio inhomogeneous potential throughout the source, which can influence the shape of the measured electron spectrum. The exterior experimental conditions generate unconventional plasma conditions resulting in a highly magnetized, partly collisional, multi-species, non-thermal (with thermal components), bound plasma. The combination of these properties make a self-contained analytical description impossible. Thus, we decided on a two-part iterative simulation approach: the slow ion physics will be covered by the newly developed Monte Carlo code KARL, which produces electron energy distributions and particle currents. The results of KARL will be used by a modified version of the well tested ACRONYM Particle in Cell code to resolve the fast electron-field interactions. The derived fields will in turn be used as input for the KARL code. On this poster, first results, key concepts and challenges of the iterative approach and the underlying codes will be presented.
We acknowledge the support of Helmholtz Association (HGF); Ministry for Education and Research BMBF (05A17PM3, 05A17PX3, 05A17VK2, 05A17PDA, 05A17WO3, 05A20VK3, 05A20PMA and 05A20PX3); Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics (HAP); the doctoral school KSETA at KIT; Helmholtz Young Investigator Group (VH-NG-1055); Max Planck Research Group (MaxPlanck@TUM); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (Research Training Group grant nos. GRK 1694, GRK 2149, and SP 1124/9); Graduate School grant no. GSC 1085-KSETA and SFB-1258 in Germany; Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (CANAM-LM2015056, LTT19005) in the Czech Republic; the Department of Energy through grants DE-FG02-97ER41020, DE-FG02-94ER40818, DE-SC0004036, DE-FG02-97ER41033, DE-FG02-97ER41041, DE-SC0011091 and DE-SC0019304; and the Federal Prime Agreement DE-AC02-05CH11231 in the USA; Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC-NG at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 852845). We thank the computing cluster support at the Institute for Astroparticle Physics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
| Collaboration | KATRIN Collaboration |
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