print

PF1B

Polarised cold neutron beam facility

Right-handed currents and symmetry breaking

Parity is maximally violated in weak interaction: only left-handed fermions take part in the interaction. In the modern grand-unified theories, the universe originally is left-right symmetric. Parity violation arises only due to a spontaneous symmetry breaking at some intermediate energy scale.
Recent neutron-decay measurements are aimed at shedding light on this question.

Perkeo III is designed for the measurement of correlations coefficients (electron, proton neutrino) in neutron decay at high count rates.

Installed on PF1B from December 2008 to August 2009. Project: Physikalisches Institut (Universität Heidelberg).

Ref.: B. Märkisch, H. Abele, D. Dubbers, F. Friedl, A. Kaplan, H. Mest, M. Schumann, T. Soldner and D. Wilkin, Nucl. Instr. Meth. A 611 (2009) 216-218.