EuNPC2015

The ECHo collaboration investigates the electron capture decay (EC) of Ho-163 for determining the mass of the electron neutrino. The spectrum of the EC is recorded by metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMC) and the neutrino mass is deduced from the analysis of the endpoint region of the spectrum. The required Ho-163 samples are produced by reactor activation of enriched Er-162. By ion exchange...

Potential detection of non-conserving lepton number processes, such as the neutrinoless double beta decay, constitutes one of the most promising signals of new physics beyond the Standard Model, apart from experiments using high energy collisions performed at LHC (CERN). In the neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) two neutrons are transformed into two protons and only two electrons are...

Neutrinoless double beta decay is a lepton-number violating process predicted by many extensions of the SM. It could be the key to understand the nature of the neutrino: it would prove its Majorana nature and the half-life of the decay would be a measure of the neutrino-mass absolute scale. The GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) experiment at the INFN, Gran Sasso Laboratory, Italy, is searching...

This talk discusses a rare nuclear transition, known as neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ), which is important for the exploration of the inverted hierarchy region of the neutrino mass pattern. The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) is an experiment that aims to search for such a transition in 130Te together with other rare processes. CUORE is a cryogenic detector,...

Superallowed Fermi beta decay provides one of the most important tests of the fundamental symmetries underlying the Standard Model of electroweak interactions. The constancy of the absolute Ft value would confirm the conserved vector current hypothesis and allow to extract the vector coupling constant and Vud matrix element of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix with the highest precision....

Beta decays are a fantastic tool to study the weak interaction described by the standard model, thus this model can be tested by precise measurements with nuclear beta decays. Among these tests, the conserved vector current (CVC) hypothesis and the unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark-mixing matrix are of great interest. The CVC hypothesis assumes that the vector coupling...

Nuclear and neutron beta decay played a major role in uncovering the structure of the weak interaction, but also remains important today in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. These searches for non-SM physics, such as novel scalar and tensor interactions, are, however, not independent from searches in other fields, such as searches at the LHC or searches for electric dipole...

Lorentz invariance is the invariance of physical laws under boosts and rotations. It is a key assumption in Special Relativity and the Standard Model of Particle Physics but has not been investigated in detail in the weak interactions. At the Van Swinderen Institute in Groningen a theoretical and experimental research program was started to study Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). The...