Toward a measurement of weak magnetism in 6He decay

Abstract

Sensitive searches for exotic scalar and tensor couplings in nuclear and neutron decays involve precision measurements of the shape of the β-energy spectrum. We have performed a high statistics measurement of the β-energy spectrum in the allowed Gamow-Teller decay of 6He with the aim to first find evidence of the contribution due to the weak magnetism form factor. We review here the motivation, describe the principle of the measurement, summarize the theoretical corrections to the allowed phase space, and anticipate the expected statistical precision.