Dispelling the curse of the neutron skin in atomic parity violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how neutron skin affects atomic parity violation measurements across various isotopes, proposing methods to measure and mitigate related errors to enhance searches for new physics.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of neutron skin effects on atomic PNC and explores isotopic ratio techniques to reduce errors in new physics searches.

Findings

Neutron skin induces errors in single-isotope PNC measurements.

Isotopic ratio methods can cancel out neutron skin errors.

Atomic PNC can potentially measure neutron skin thickness.

Abstract

We perform calculations for the neutron skin of nuclei and its contribution to atomic parity non-conservation (PNC) in many isotopes of Cs, Ba, Sm, Dy, Yb, Tl, Pb, Bi, Fr, Ra. Three problems are addressed: i) Neutron-skin induced errors to single-isotope PNC, ii) Possibility to measure neutron skin using atomic PNC, iii) Neutron-skin induced errors for ratios of PNC effects in different isotopes. In the latter case the correlations in the neutron skin values for different isotopes lead to cancelations of the errors; this makes the isotopic ratio method a competitive tool in a search for new physics beyond the standard model.