Speaker
Description
The free neutron lifetime has been measured in two ways: by measuring the decay products of neutrons in a well calibrated neutron beam (beam experiment), or by counting the number of surviving neutrons stored in a UCN trap over time (bottle experiment). The lifetime results from the two different methods differ by 10 seconds, or five standard deviations. Recently, there has been a variety of experiments based on the “bottle method”, and these experiments have produced similar results with completely different treatments of the systematic errors. The average lifetime value extracted from the “beam” experiments is mainly from the Penning trap technique, and most of the statistics come from only a single experiment. One possible explanation for this large discrepancy is that one of the two methods has unaccounted systematic errors. The goal of the UCNProBe experiment is to measure the neutron lifetime to 1 second level using a novel “beam” technique with completely different systematic errors. In this talk, we will describe the experimental technique in detail and provide an update on the R&D progress on the experiment.
