Impact of ADC non-linearities on the sensitivity to sterile keV neutrinos with a KATRIN-like experiment

Understand

ADC non-linearities are a major systematic effect in the search for keV-scale sterile neutrinos with tritium $\beta$-decay experiments like KATRIN.

• They can significantly distort the spectral shape and thereby obscure the tiny kink-like signature of a sterile neutrino.
• In this work we demonstrate various mitigation techniques to reduce the impact of ADC non-linearities on the tritium $\beta$-decay spectrum to a level of $<$ ppm.
• The best results are achieved with a multi-pixel ($\geq10^4$ pixels) detector using full waveform digitization.