An Investigation of Proton Pair Correlations Relevant to the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of 76ge
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Ticehurst, David. An Investigation of Proton Pair Correlations Relevant to the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of 76ge. 2016. https://doi.org/10.17615/e7en-3711APA
Ticehurst, D. (2016). An Investigation of Proton Pair Correlations Relevant to the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of 76ge. https://doi.org/10.17615/e7en-3711Chicago
Ticehurst, David. 2016. An Investigation of Proton Pair Correlations Relevant to the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of 76ge. https://doi.org/10.17615/e7en-3711- Last Modified
- March 22, 2019
- Creator
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Ticehurst, David
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Physics and Astronomy
- Abstract
- The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay (0vBB) would demonstrate that the neutrino is a Majorana particle and allow determination of its mass by comparing the measured decay rate to the calculated rate. The main uncertainty in the calculation of the 0vBB rate is due to uncertainties in the nuclear structure models used in the computation of the nuclear matrix elements for the decay process. This project tested the validity of using wavefunctions for the nuclear states involved in the 0vBB process that are based on a first-order application of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity. In the BCS approximation, most of the strength for two-nucleon transfer reactions should be for transitions to the 0+ ground state of the final nucleus (i.e., little strength should go to the 0+ excited states). This experiment measured the strength to the first 0+ excited state for the 74Ge(3He,n)76Se and 76Ge(3He,n)78Se reactions relative to the strength for transition to the 0+ ground state in selenium. For both nuclei, and at 3He beam energies of 15 and 21 MeV, the observed relative strength for transfer to the first 0+ excited state was less than 13%. This result supports the validity of using the BCS approximation to describe the ground state of both 76Se and 78Se and is consistent with the results of recent (3He,n) cross section measurements on 74Ge and 76Ge. In addition, the magnitude and shape of the measured angular distributions suggest that contribution of the sequential two-nucleon transfer process, which is an indicator of long-range nucleon-nucleon correlations, is over-predicted by the DWBA code FRESCO.
- Date of publication
- December 2016
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- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Kannappan, Sheila
- Champagne, Arthur
- Henning, Reyco
- Engel, Jonathan
- Howell, Calvin
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2016
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