Sterile neutrinos are a minimal extension of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. If their mass is in the kilo-electron-volt regime, they are viable dark matter candidates. One way to search for sterile neutrinos in a laboratory-based experiment is via tritium-beta decay, where the new neutrino mass eigenstate would manifest itself as a kink-like distortion of the β-decay spectrum. The objective of the TRISTAN project is to extend the KATRIN setup with a new multi-pixel silicon drift detector system to search for a keV-scale sterile neutrino signal. In this paper we describe the requirements of such a new detector, and present first characterization measurement results obtained with a 7-pixel prototype system.

The possibility of fast X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging using on‐the‐fly acquisition is very attractive due to its high acquisition speed. The underlying assumption is that there must be a meaningful flux of XRF emitted photons collected by the detectors. On‐the‐fly XRF has already been demonstrated at mid‐to‐high X‐ray energies, both for laboratory and synchrotron‐based instruments. In this manuscript, we report on the capability of DANTE digital pulse processor (DPP) in the soft X‐ray regime. DANTE is a novel compact and low‐power DPP with high energy resolution and high count rate. This work presents preliminary measurements performed at the TwinMic beamline at Elettra synchrotron (Trieste, Italy) addressing the feasibility of on‐the‐fly low energy XRF imaging.

No abstract