A new method for measuring the neutron lifetime using an in situ neutron detector
Abstract
The neutron lifetime is important in understanding the production of light nuclei in the first minutes after the big bang and it provides basic information on the charged weak current of the standard model of particle physics. Two different methods have been used to measure the neutron lifetime: disappearance measurements using bottled ultracold neutrons and decay rate measurements using neutron beams. The best measurements using these two techniques give results that differ by nearly 4 standard deviations. In this paper we describe a new method for measuring surviving neutrons in neutron lifetime measurements using bottled ultracold neutrons that provides better characterization of systematic uncertainties and enables higher precision than previous measurement techniques. We present results obtained using our method.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1610.04560,
title = {A new method for measuring the neutron lifetime using an in situ neutron detector},
author = {C. L. Morris and E. R. Adamek and L. J. Broussard and N. B. Callahan and S. M. Clayton and C. Cude-Woods and S. A. Currie and X. Ding and W. Fox and K. P. Hickerson and A. T. Holley and A. Komives and C. -Y. Liu and M. Makela and R. W. Pattie and J. Ramsey and D. J. Salvat and A. Saunders and S. J. Seestrom and E. I. Sharapov and S. K. Sjue and Z. Tang and J. Vanderwerp and B. Vogelaar and P. L. Walstrom and Z. Wang and Wanchun Wei and J. W. Wexler and T. L. Womack and A. R. Young and B. A. Zeck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.04560},
year = {2017}
}