Magnetic evaporative cooling of atomic tritium for Project 8

Project 8 aims to probe the absolute neutrino mass to a 40meV scale by studying the endpoint of the tritium beta decay spectrum via Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES). A high flux atomic tritium source will improve the energy resolution by eliminating the molecular vibration states, which is a crucial requirement to reach the desired precision. Project 8 is developing techniques to cool such large atomic fluxes to the mK temperatures required to trap them for a CRES experiment. A cooling apparatus is under construction to demonstrate magnetic evaporative cooling beamline (MECB) using lithium as a proxy to tritium. In this talk, we give an overview of MECB, the current status of the Li MECB demonstrator, and beam diagnostics from laser spectroscopy.