Atomic Physics Seminars

Parity violation, discovered in 1957 in nuclear beta decay, is unique to the weak interaction. This property makes it possible to isolate weak contributions from the residual strong force, which dominates hadronic interactions by 7 orders of magnitude. The NPDGamma experiment is being carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory to extract the weak pion-nucleon coupling by measuring the parity violating asymmetry in radiative neutron-proton capture with polarized neutrons to an accuarcy of 5x10-9. I will describe this experiment and give some prelimary results.