B. Märkisch

A Clean, bright, and versatile source of neutron decay products

Abstract We present a case study on a new type of beam station for the measurement of angular correlations in the β-decay of free neutrons. This beam station, called proton and electron radiation channel (PERC), is a cold-neutron guide that delivers at its open end, instead of neutrons, a beam of electrons and protons from neutron decays that take place far inside the guide. These charged neutron-decay products are magnetically guided to the end of the neutron guide, where they are separated from the cold-neutron beam. In this way, a general-purpose source of neutron decay products is obtained which can be operated as a user facility for a variety of different experiments in neutron decay correlation spectroscopy that may be installed at this beam station. The angular distribution of the emitted charged particles depends on the magnetic field configuration and can be chosen freely, according to the need of the experiment being carried out. A gain in phase space density of several orders of magnitude can be achieved with PERC, as compared to existing neutron decay spectrometers. Detailed calculations show that the spectra and angular distributions of the emerging electrons and protons will be distortion- and background-free on the level of 10−4, more than 10 times better than that achieved today.

Measurement of the proton asymmetry parameter in neutron beta decay.

The proton asymmetry parameter C in neutron decay describes the angular correlation between neutron spin and proton momentum. In this Letter, the first measurement of this quantity is presented. The result C= -0.2377(26) agrees with the standard model expectation. The coefficient C provides an additional parameter for new and improved standard model tests.

New instrumentation for precise (n,γ) measurements at ILL Grenoble

An array of eight Ge detectors for coincidence measurements of γ rays from neutron-capture reactions has been constructed at the PF1B cold-neutron facility of the Institut Laue-Langevin. The detectors arranged in one plane every 45° can be used for angular correlation measurements. The neutron collimation line of the setup provides a neutron beam of 12 mm in diameter and the capture flux of about 108/(s × cm2) at the target position, with a negligible neutron halo. With the setup up to 109 γγ and up to 108 triple-γ coincidence events have been collected in a day measurement. Precise energy and efficiency calibrations up to 10 MeV are easily performed with 27Al(n,γ)28Al and 35Cl(n,γ)36Cl reactions. Test measurements have shown that neutron binding energies can be determined with an accuracy down to a few eV and angular correlation coefficients measured with a precision down to a percent level. The triggerless data collected with a digital electronics and acquisition allows to determine half-lives of excited levels in the nano- to microsecond range. The high resolving power of double- and triple-γ time coincidences allows significant improvements of excitation schemes reported in previous (n,γ) works and complements high-resolution γ-energy measurements at the double-crystal Bragg spectrometer GAMS of ILL.

Neutron Decay with PERC: a Progress Report

The PERC collaboration will perform high-precision measurements of angular correlations in neutron beta decay at the beam facility MEPHISTO of the Forschungs-Neutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz in Munich, Germany. The new beam station PERC, a clean, bright, and versatile source of neutron decay products, is designed to improve the sensitivity of neutron decay studies by one order of magnitude. The charged decay products are collected by a strong longitudinal magnetic field directly from inside a neutron guide. This combination provides the highest phase space density of decay products. A magnetic mirror serves to perform precise cuts in phase space, reducing related systematic errors. The new instrument PERC is under development by an international collaboration. The physics motivation, sensitivity, and applications of PERC as well as the status of the design and preliminary results on uncertainties in proton spectroscopy are presented in this paper.

The point spread function of electrons in a magnetic field, and the decay of the free neutron

Abstract Experiments in nuclear and particle physics often use magnetic fields to guide charged reaction products to a detector. Due to their gyration in the guide field, the particles hit the detector within an area that can be considerably larger than the diameter of the source where the particles are produced. This blurring of the image of the particle source on the detector surface is described by a suitable point spread function (PSF), which is defined as the image of a point source. We derive simple analytical expressions for such “magnetic” PSFs, valid for any angular distribution of the emitted particles that can be developed in Legendre polynomials. We investigate this rather general problem in the context of neutron β-decay spectrometers and study the effect of limited detector size on measured neutron decay correlation parameters. To our surprise, insufficient detector size does not affect the accuracy of such measurements much, even for rather large radii of gyration. This finding can considerably simplify the layout of the respective spectrometers.

The Beta-, Neutrino- and Proton-Asymmetry in Neutron β-Decay

This article describes measurements of angular-correlation coefficients in the decay of free neutrons with the superconducting spectrometer PERKEO II. A method for measuring the β-asymmetry coefficient A is presented, as well as a new method for determining the neutrino-asymmetry coefficient B, which allows a value for the proton-asymmetry coefficient C to be obtained for the first time. An ongoing experiment is trying to improve the accuracy of these quantities.