Also predictions of observable double
beta decay rates close to their experimental limits are discussed below in Section 6.
Neutrinoless double
beta decay will be the main object of the experiment and certainly the one that will be tackled initially.
If this technique for detection of radiative neutron
beta decay proves fruitful, a more precise measurement of the photon spectrum should be possible.
Precision measurements of neutron
beta decay correlations, a, b, B, and A, provide important tests of the electroweak standard model: a test of unitarity of the first row of the CKM matrix, a test of the CVC hypothesis, and a sensitive search for right-handed currents or scalar or tensor bosons.
Barabash, "Double
beta decay experiments," Physics of Particles and Nuclei, vol.
Drexlinb et al., "KATRIN-a next generation tritium
beta decay experiment with sub-eV sensitivity for the electron neutrino mass," http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hepex/0109033.
Beta decays of [sup.39]Ar have a Q value of 565 keV and do not contribute to the background for neutrinoless double
beta decay.
The entire experiment is inside a room-sized tank that chills it to 160 kelvins to increase the incidence of
beta decays as the gas moves along.
Drexlin et al., "KATRIN: a next generation tritium
beta decay experiment with sub-eV sensitivity for the electron neutrino mass.
We review and discuss the time-reversal-odd R and D correlations in neutron and nuclear
beta decay.
Around 1930, an anomaly in the important nuclear transformation process called
beta decay gave physicist Wolfgang Pauli the occasion to postulate the neutrino's existence.
NEXT-100 will search for neutrinoless double
beta decay ([beta][beta]0v) events using 100 kg of xenon enriched at 90% in the isotope [sup.136]Xe.