A challenging facility

The KATRIN experiment has been set up at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on its Campus North Site. Here, the worldwide unique Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe exists, giving the technical prerequisite to use the beta-decay of tritium to infer in a model-independent way the neutrino mass. To achieve the goals of the ultra-high precise energy measurement of the beta-electrons from tritium decay it needs several technologies at their limits. Ultra-high vacuum technology is the prime example but also in cryogenics, super-conductive magnets, detector technology and several others fields the success of the experiment relies on unique R&D applications. The overall length of the experiment exceeds 70 meters and is optically dominated by the world’s largest UHV vacuum recipient. Technical details of the setup are described in the Technical Design Report, for which an update of the as-built version is in progress.