Chiral three-nucleon interaction and the carbon-14 dating beta decay

TL;DR

This paper investigates the beta decay of carbon-14 using shell model calculations, incorporating chiral three-nucleon forces to accurately reproduce its long lifetime, highlighting the importance of short-range three-nucleon interactions.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel application of chiral three-nucleon forces in shell model calculations to explain the long lifetime of carbon-14 decay.

Findings

Inclusion of in-medium NN interaction reduces the Gamow-Teller matrix element.

Short-range 3NF is crucial for reproducing the observed decay lifetime.

Uncertainties from off-shell extrapolation are relatively small.

Abstract

We present a shell model calculation for the beta decay of 14-C to the 14-N ground-state, treating the relevant nuclear states as two 0p-holes in an 16-O core. Employing the universal low-momentum nucleon-nucleon potential V(low-k) only, one finds that the Gamow-Teller matrix element is too large to describe the known (very long) lifetime of 14-C. As a novel approach to the problem, we invoke the chiral three-nucleon force (3NF) at leading order and derive from it a density-dependent in-medium NN interaction. Including this effective in-medium NN interaction, the Gamow-Teller matrix element vanishes for a nuclear density close to that of saturated nuclear matter. The genuine short-range part of the three-nucleon interaction plays a particularly important role in this context, since the medium modifications to the pion propagator and pion-nucleon vertex (due to the long-range 3NF) tend to cancel out in the relevant observable. We discuss also uncertainties related to the off-shell extrapolation of the in-medium NN interaction. Using the off-shell behavior of V(low-k) as a guide, we find that these uncertainties are rather small.