Probing the Absolute Neutrino Mass Scale

Over the past decade, experiments studying neutrinos from atmospheric, solar, and reactor sources have shown conclusively that neutrinos change flavor and, as a consequence, have a small but finite mass. Yet, the scale of neutrino masses remains an open question that is of great importance for many areas of physics. The absolute value of neutrino-masses will have crucial implications for cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is the next generation tritium beta decay experiment with sub-eV sensitivity to make a direct, model independent measurement of the electron neutrino mass. The principle of the experiment is to look for a distortion at the high energy endpoint of the electron spectrum of tritium beta decay. KATRIN will reach a final sensitivity of 200 meV at 90% C.L. on the absolute neutrino mass scale