Research Activities of the Institute for Nuclear Physics (IK)

At the world’s largest air shower experiment, the AUGER-Observatory, the IK is involved in designing and building the fluorescence telescopes and the electronics for data taking and triggering. The telescopes detect showers of the highest energies directly by their fluorescense radiation. The muon component is measured at ground level by 1600 water-filled detector tanks distributed over the whole Auger site of about 3000 km².

Starting in 1996 KASCADE examines the composition of cosmic rays in the energy range 10¹⁴ to 10¹⁷eV. A central detector records the hadronic component of the shower core, 252 stations in an area of 200 x 200 m² determine distribution and direction of muons und electrons. In 2001 the experiment was augmented over the whole Campus North by adding new stations. The KASCADE-Grande experiment now measures cosmic rays up to 10¹⁸ eV.

KATRIN intends to determine directly the mass of the electron neutrino or set a new upper limit as low as 0.2 eV/c² by measuring precisely the shape of the β spectrum from tritium decay near the endpoint. The current upper llimit is 2.3 eV/c² KATRIN is currently being built at the Karlsruhe Tritium Laboratory by an international collaboration including four KIT institutes. IK is responsible for the spectrometers und takes part in several other tasks in KATRIN.