1 / 17

Characterization of an Antenna for the Search of Neutrino Mass.

Characterization of an Antenna for the Search of Neutrino Mass. By: John Ndungu Advisor: Dr. Leslie Rosenberg Post Doc Advisor: Dr. Gray Rybka Philander Smith College University of Washington Department of Physics. Index:. Intro: Neutrinos. Neutrino mass. Tritium. Project 8.

thadine
Download Presentation

Characterization of an Antenna for the Search of Neutrino Mass.

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Characterization of an Antenna for the Search of Neutrino Mass. By: John Ndungu Advisor: Dr. Leslie Rosenberg Post Doc Advisor: Dr. Gray Rybka Philander Smith College University of Washington Department of Physics

  2. Index: • Intro: • Neutrinos. • Neutrino mass. • Tritium. • Project 8. • Procedure: • What is project 8. • What I built. • What was I measuring? • How did I do the measurements.

  3. Index: • Results: • Data. • Observations. • Conclusion: • Unexpected data. • Possible causes. • Future endeavors.

  4. Neutrinos: • Small elementary particles theorized by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. • They were once thought to be massless under the standard model. • Extremely abundant (50 trillion solar neutrinos pass through human body every second).

  5. Neutrino Mass: • Once thought to be massless under the standard model. • Due to experiments with neutrino flavor oscillations, it was concluded that they have a mass. • The current consensus of neutrino mass states that it is less than 2.7 eV (KATRIN will improve on this figure). • J Bahcall and H Bethe. Phys. Rev. Lett. 65. 2233-2235, 1990. • R Davis et al Phys. Rev. Lett. 20. 1205-1209, 1968.

  6. Tritium: • Tritium, also known as Hydrogen-3 is a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen. • When Tritium beta decays into Helium 3, it releases an electron and an electron antineutrino:

  7. Project 8: • Purpose of project 8 is to measure energy of electrons (released in the decay) in order to determine mass of neutrinos. • To do this, we utilize an antenna array that detects electrons trapped in a solenoid magnet. G Rybka “A Proposal to Detect Single Electrons through their Radiation of Power into a Two-Wire Transmission Line” Project 8 Internal Note 2009.

  8. How project 8 works: • Tritium gas is placed in the middle and allowed to decay. • Electrons that are released begin to spin due to the magnetic force. • They are then detected by the antennas. B Monreal and J Formaggio. “Relativistic Cyclotron Radiation Detection of Tritium Decay Electrons as a New Technique for Measuring the Neutrino Mass” 2009. arXiv:0904.2860v1 [nucl-ex].

  9. What I built • One of my duties was to create a prototype of the antenna assembly using two wires connected to a spectrum analyzer. • I would then use a dipole antenna (made from a BNC cable) to simulate an electron signal.

  10. Device with antenna:

  11. How I did the measurements • I split the cavity into several zones according to the length of the wire and the height of the position of the antenna (with respect to the two wires).

  12. Data: Data @ 2.5 in., spacing 2 • For the most part the data fit the theoretical function. • However it still needs to be modified as the wire spacing changes (note bottom pic). Data @ 2.5 in., spacing 1

  13. Data: Data @ 6.5 in., spacing 1 Data @ 4.5 in., spacing 2 Data @ 6.5 in., spacing 2 Data @ 8.5 in., spacing 1

  14. Observations: • Even though there were a few observable “bumps” in the data, most of it coincided with the theoretical function we derived. • The function changes as the method of data capturing changes (for ex. P(0)). • The final function I came up with to fit the data was:

  15. Conclusion: • Possible causes for unexpected data “bumps”: • Data was collected in a room with a lot of metal. Could have reflected stray signals. • Some of the signal could have radiated from coax BNC cable coating. • Imperfect dipole and antenna construction. • Difficulty with position measurements.

  16. Future of project 8: • Some things that I would suggest to focus on for future project 8 research are: • Using thinner wires to serve as the antennas. • Finding a way to shield the device from stray signals. • Finding ways to make the signal reception clearer and more consistent in order to better derive the power function.

  17. Questions?

More Related