Nuclear Physics Seminars

A proton source is being developed at the University of Virginia (UVa) for the purposes of precise characterization of the silicon detectors used in the Nab experiment. The Nab experiment is expected to lower the uncertainty of the electron–neutrino angular correlation parameter in the neutron beta decay cross-section to O(10−4 ) as a probe of the unitarity of the quark-mixing Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Masakawa (CKM) matrix. To determine the sensitivity of the Nab detectors to the varying energy and angle of the resulting protons from neutron beta decay, the proton source at UVa will be made to have ≲ O(10−4 ) deviation in proton counts per hour. Progress on the development of the proton source will be discussed.