The neutron as a Standard Model testbed: radiative corrections
Prof. Leendert Hayen
Assistant Research Professor, Department of Physics
NC State
The success of the Standard Model of particle physics is in part due to its impressive capacity for calculating quantum corrections to extremely high precision. This is particularly the case for the neutron - a system which interacts strongly, weakly and electromagnetically - which is rich in physics without being prohibitively complex, making it a prime candidate for searching for Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics. Besides top-row unitarity tests of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, the rise of precise lattice QCD calculations in recent years have enabled direct searches for exotic right-handed weak currents which arise naturally in many BSM scenarios. Both of these require exquisite control of electroweak radiative corrections, the latter of which has seen a surge of activity in the past three years. Recently, we have calculated for the first the complete electroweak radiative corrections to the nucleon axial charge, gA, up to next-to-leading order, indicating that experimental results for gA must be corrected for when comparing to lattice results. Additionally, we will report on new work treating strong isospin breaking corrections using chiral effective field theory and provide an outlook for low-mass nuclear systems.
Hosted by Prof. Brodeur
Email physics@nd.edu for the zoom link.