Speaker
Ms
Audrey Fung
(APCTP)
Description
There has been a long-standing tension in measurements of the neutron lifetime between beam and bottle experiments. It has been established that such a disagreement could be explained by any additional decay channel that does not involve protons in the final state. We present a search using ancient minerals to look for invisible neutron decay, a.k.a. paleodetection. If neutrons in minerals decay via such a channel, the recoiling nuclei would create tracks a few microns in length. Since these tracks are well above typical readout resolution, it is feasible to scan of order 100 grams of sample, giving a total exposure of order 100 kiloton-years. This makes paleodetection a promising a complementary probe of the neutron lifetime anomaly.
Primary authors
Ms
Audrey Fung
(APCTP)
Mr
Jinheung Kim
(KIAS)
Prof.
Shohei Okawa
(APCTP)
