Isospin mixing in the ground state of 52Mn

The presence of isospin mixing into the ground state of Mn-52 was studied via anisotropic positron emission from nuclei. With this method the isospin forbidden Fermi-component in the Gamow-Teller dominated beta decay was determined. It is shown that sample purity and the control of positron scattering is of vital importance. Comparison between theory and experiment shows that shell model calculations of the isospin mixing probability deviate by a factor three to seven from experiment. For more recent Hartree-Fock-RPA based calculations the difference is over two orders of magnitude. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.