Paper detail

Tracing Remnants of the Baryon Vector Current Anomaly in Neutron Radiative Beta Decay

Harvey, Hill, and Hill have found that unexpected interactions involving the nucleon, photon, and weak gauge bosons at low energies emerge from gauging the axial anomaly of QCD under the full electroweak symmetry of the Standard Model (SM). In this contribution we consider how such interactions can be isolated through a triple-product momentum correlation in neutron radiative beta-decay. The correlation is both parity- and naively time-reversal-odd, so that it vanishes in the Standard Model save for effects induced by final-state interactions (FSI). Nevertheless, the correlation can be generated by sources of CP violation beyond the Standard Model, and such couplings, being spin-independent, are not constrained by the nonobservation of the neutron electric dipole moment (EDM). We consider the sorts of limits on its strength which can be determined at existing and anticipated facilities, as well as the size of induced correlations from known FSI. We also briefly consider the possibility of nuclear beta-decay studies as well as the prospects for muon-induced reaction studies.