The weak nuclear force is currently not entirely understood, despite being one of the four fundamental forces of nature. In a pair of Physical Review Letters articles, a multi-institutional team, including theorists and experimentalists from Louisiana State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions worked closely together to test physics beyond the „Standard Model“ through high-precision measurements of nuclear beta decay.
The weak nuclear force is currently not entirely understood, despite being one of the four fundamental forces of nature. In a pair of Physical Review Letters articles, a multi-institutional team, including theorists and experimentalists from Louisiana State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions worked closely together to test physics beyond the „Standard Model“ through high-precision measurements of nuclear beta decay.
By loading lithium-8 ions, an exotic heavy isotope of lithium with a less than one second half-life, in an ion trap, the experimental team was able to detect the energy and directions of the particles emitted in the beta decay of lithium-8 produced with the ATLAS accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory and held in an ion trap. Different underlying mechanisms for the weak nuclear force would give rise to distinct energy and angular distributions, which the team determined to unrivaled precision.
State-of-the-art calculations with the ab initio symmetry-adapted no-core shell model, developed at Louisiana State University, had to be performed to precisely account for typically neglected effects that are 100 times smaller than the dominant decay contributions.
