https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921903002
Progress on the BL2 beam measurement of the neutron lifetime
1 National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA
2 University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA
3 Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408, USA
4 Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA
5 University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
6 Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325, USA
7 Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
8 Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA
a e-mail: shannon.hoogerheide@nist.gov
Published online: 12 December 2019
A precise value of the neutron lifetime is important in several areas of physics, including determinations of the quark-mixing matrix element |Vud|, related tests of the Standard Model, and predictions of light element abundances in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis models. We report the progress on a new measurement of the neutron lifetime utilizing the cold neutron beam technique. Several experimental improvements in both neutron and proton counting that have been developed over the last decade are presented. This new effort should yield a final uncertainty on the lifetime of 1 s with an improved understanding of the systematic effects.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
