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Home  ⪧  Research  ⪧  Astroparticle Physics  ⪧  Ptolemy

Ptolemy

The goal of Ptolemy is the discovery of the cosmological background of neutrinos. Less than a second after the Big Bang, almost 50% of the total energy density of the Universe was made up of the kinetic energy of neutrinos. At that time, neutrinos decoupled from matter and began their journey across the Universe. These neutrinos - relics of a primordial age of the Universe - arrive today on Earth from a distance of less than two billion light years.

Starting from an idea of ​​S.Weinberg (Phys. Rev.128 1457) - revisited more recently [Alfredo G Cocco et al., JCAP06 (2007) 015] - Ptolemy proposes to use tritium atoms as targets to absorb cosmological neutrinos. An electron of fixed kinetic energy emerges from this process. Ptolemy aims to develop a technology capable of detecting these electrons with an energetic resolution never previously obtained. In this phase Ptolemy aims to develop a series of technologies aimed at defining the design and construction of a "demonstrator", such as:

• the study of absorption of tritium on graphene;
• the detection of cyclotron radiation emitted by the electron in a magnetic field;
• the study of a system of magnetic and electric fields capable of filtering the enormous number of electrons produced per second;
• micro-calorimeters based on superconducting materials.

Such a demonstrator would be first of all a detector capable of analyzing the beta spectrum of tritium with a sensitivity never obtained before in the measurement of the mass of the electron neutrino.

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Websites:

• Ptolemy International

Thesis Opportunities:

Please contact Gianluca Cavoto to learn about thesis opportunities or visit the link to the thesis webpage of the Physics Department.

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Local Coordinator

Gianluca Cavoto

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