Chirality-flipping currents



The charged-current part of the weak interaction shows a very special behavior with respect to helicity properties, usually referred to as `purely left handed'. New physics at high energies could be detectable by a breaking of this symmetry. By doing precision measurements in nuclear beta decays with nuclei for which nuclear-structure calculations can be done with high accuracy, we are searching for possible deviations from the Standard Model.



Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator


We use the local accelerator to produce 6He and 19Ne, which we use for precision measurements


Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator



6He laser trapping


Atoms of 6He were trapped and a determination of the beta-nu correlation was performed

Laser setup photo Photo : Graduate students David Zumwalt and Yelena Bagdasarova working on the 6He laser trapping setup.


 " "

He6-CRES


6He-CRES: A collaboration working on detecting microwaves from cyclotron radiation for precision beta spectra measurements.

 He6-CRES setup photo Photo (left to right): Heather Harrington, Winston DeGraw, Drew Byron, Kris Knutsen working on the 6He-CRES setup.