Journal
NATURE PHYSICS
Volume 15, Issue 5, Pages 428-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-019-0450-7
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Funding
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) [DE-AC52-07NA27344]
- Office of Nuclear Physics, US Department of Energy [DE-FG02-96ER40963, DE-FG02-97ER41014, DE-SC0008499, DE-SC0018223, DE-SC0015376]
- FWP [SCW1579]
- LDRD [18-ERD-008, 18-ERD-058]
- Lawrence Fellowship Program at LLNL
- NSERC [SAPIN-2016-00033]
- ERC [307986 STRONGINT]
- DFG [SFB 1245]
- National Research Council of Canada
- Office of Science of the Department of Energy [DE-AC05-00OR22725]
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) [ERKBP57, ERKBP72]
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The dominant decay mode of atomic nuclei is beta decay (beta-decay), a process that changes a neutron into a proton (and vice versa). This decay offers a window to physics beyond the standard model, and is at the heart of microphysical processes in stellar explosions and element synthesis in the Universe(1-3). However, observed beta-decay rates in nuclei have been found to be systematically smaller than for free neutrons: this 50-year-old puzzle about the apparent quenching of the fundamental coupling constant by a factor of about 0.75 (ref.(4)) is without a first-principles theoretical explanation. Here, we demonstrate that this quenching arises to a large extent from the coupling of the weak force to two nucleons as well as from strong correlations in the nucleus. We present state-of-the-art computations of beta-decays from light- and medium-mass nuclei to Sn-100 by combining effective field theories of the strong and weak forces(5) with powerful quantum many-body techniques(6-8). Our results are consistent with experimental data and have implications for heavy element synthesis in neutron star mergers(9-11) and predictions for the neutrino-less double-beta-decay(3), where an analogous quenching puzzle is a source of uncertainty in extracting the neutrino mass scale(12).
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