English

Tritium $\beta$-decay in chiral effective field theory

Nuclear Theory 2017-01-06 v3

Abstract

We evaluate the Fermi and Gamow-Teller (GT) matrix elements in tritium β\beta-decay by including in the charge-changing weak current the corrections up to one loop recently derived in nuclear chiral effective field theory (χ\chi EFT). The trinucleon wave functions are obtained from hyperspherical-harmonics solutions of the Schrodinger equation with two- and three-nucleon potentials corresponding to either χ\chi EFT (the N3LO/N2LO combination) or meson-exchange phenomenology (the AV18/UIX combination). We find that contributions due to loop corrections in the axial current are, in relative terms, as large as (and in some cases, dominate) those from one-pion exchange, which nominally occur at lower order in the power counting. We also provide values for the low-energy constants multiplying the contact axial current and three-nucleon potential, required to reproduce the experimental GT matrix element and trinucleon binding energies in the N3LO/N2LO and AV18/UIX calculations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.01620,
  title  = {Tritium $\beta$-decay in chiral effective field theory},
  author = {A. Baroni and L. Girlanda and A. Kievsky and L. E. Marcucci and R. Schiavilla and M. Viviani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.01620},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

19 pages,6 figures, corrections to Text as suggested by Referee added; Erratum: 4 pages, 3 figures, corrections to Eq.(20), Tables I, II, III, Figures 4, 5, conclusions unchanged