Proton Recoil Energy and Angular Distribution of Neutron Radiative Beta Decay

TL;DR

This paper investigates the proton recoil energy and angular distribution in neutron radiative beta decay, accounting for proton-photon correlations, and assesses their impact on decay asymmetries and radiative corrections.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of proton-photon correlations in neutron radiative beta decay, showing their effects on recoil asymmetry and confirming consistency with existing radiative correction models.

Findings

Proton-photon correlations contribute about 10^(-4) to the recoil asymmetry.

These correlations make the radiative correction contributions symmetric with respect to A_0 and B_0.

The analysis confirms compatibility with established models of neutron decay corrections.

Abstract

We analyse the proton recoil energy and angular distribution of the radiative beta-decay of the neutron to leading order in the large baryon mass expansion by taking into account the contributions of the proton-photon correlations. We show that the account for the proton-photon correlations does not contradict the description of the radiative corrections to the lifetime of the neutron and the proton recoil energy spectrum of the neutron beta-decay in terms of the functions (\alpha/\pi) g_n(E_e) and (\alpha/\pi) f_n(E_e), where E_e is the electron energy. In addition we find that the contributions of the proton-photon correlations in the radiative beta-decay of the neutron to the proton recoil asymmetry C are of order 10^(-4). They make the contributions of the radiative corrections to the proton recoil asymmetry C symmetric with respect to a change A_0 <--> B_0, where A_0 and B_0 are the correlation coefficients of the neutron beta-decay.