Institut de recherche sur les lois fondamentales de l'Univers

The KATRIN experiment  is designed to directly probe the mass of neutrinos with a sensitivity of 0.2 eV (90% CL). KATRIN offers a model-independent approach based principally on the kinematics of tritium beta decay. A  non-zero neutrino mass manifests itself as a small spectral distortion close to the endpoint of the electron spectrum. In spring 2019 KATRIN carried out its first neutrino mass measurement campaign. This first dataset established new limits on neutrino mass reaching for the first time the sub-eV regime. In this presentation the operating principle of KATRIN and the first neutrino mass results will be presented.