The St. Benedict Facility: Probing Fundamental Symmetries through Mixed Mirror <i>β</i>-Decays

Precise measurements of nuclear beta decays provide a unique insight into the Standard Model due to their connection to the electroweak interaction. These decays help constrain the unitarity or non-unitarity of the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix, and can uniquely probe the exist...

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Main Authors: William S. Porter, Daniel W. Bardayan, Maxime Brodeur, Daniel P. Burdette, Jason A. Clark, Aaron T. Gallant, Alicen M. Houff, James J. Kolata, Biying Liu, Patrick D. O’Malley, Caleb Quick, Fabio Rivero, Guy Savard, Adrian A. Valverde, Regan Zite
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-10-01
Series:Atoms
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2218-2004/11/10/129
Description
Summary:Precise measurements of nuclear beta decays provide a unique insight into the Standard Model due to their connection to the electroweak interaction. These decays help constrain the unitarity or non-unitarity of the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix, and can uniquely probe the existence of exotic scalar or tensor currents. Of these decays, superallowed mixed mirror transitions have been the least well-studied, in part due to the absence of data on their Fermi to Gamow-Teller mixing ratios (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>ρ</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula>). At the Nuclear Science Laboratory (NSL) at the University of Notre Dame, the Superallowed Transition Beta-Neutrino Decay Ion Coincidence Trap (St. Benedict) is being constructed to determine the <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>ρ</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula> for various mirror decays via a measurement of the beta–neutrino angular correlation parameter (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>a</mi><mrow><mi>β</mi><mi>ν</mi></mrow></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula>) to a relative precision of 0.5%. In this work, we present an overview of the St. Benedict facility and the impact it will have on various Beyond the Standard Model studies, including an expanded sensitivity study of <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>ρ</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula> for various mirror nuclei accessible to the facility. A feasibility evaluation is also presented that indicates the measurement goals for many mirror nuclei, which are currently attainable in a week of radioactive beam delivery at the NSL.
ISSN:2218-2004