As a part of our program to test the unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, the decay of the superallowed 0⁺ --> 0⁺ beta emitters ³⁸Ca and ⁴⁶V has been studied in this dissertation. For ³⁸Ca, the half-life, 443.88(36) ms, and superallowed branching ratio, 0.7738(41), have been measured. In our half-life experiment, pure sources of ³⁸Ca were produced and the decay positrons detected in a high-efficiency 4[pi] proportional gas counter. Since the beta⁺ decay of ³⁸Ca feeds ³⁸K^m, which is itself a superallowed beta⁺ emitter, the data were analyzed as a linked parent-daughter decay. Our result for the half-life of ³⁸Ca, with a precision of 0.08%, is a factor of five improvement on the best previous result. The branching-ratio of ³⁸Ca depended on beta-delayed gamma-ray intensities being measured with a high-purity germanium detector calibrated for absolute efficiency to 0.2% precision. This branching-ratio result represents our first step in bringing the ft value for the superallowed ³⁸Ca transition into the desired range of 0.1%. With our half-life and superallowed branching ratio results for ³⁸Ca, we obtain the Ft to be 3072(17) s, in good agreement with the conserved vector current expectation. The half-life of ⁴⁶V has been measured to be 422.66(6) ms, a factor of two more precise than the best previous measurement. Our present result determines the corresponding Ft value to be 3074.5(26) s, which is consistent with the average $\overline{\mathcal{F}t}$ value of 3072.08(79) s established from the 13 best-known superallowed transitions. This demonstrates that previously accepted half-lives of ⁴⁶V were correct in their contribution to a precision test of the conserved vector current hypothesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-08-10182 |
| Date | 2011 August 1900 |
| Creators | Park, Hyo-In |
| Contributors | Hardy, John C. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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