β decay of (38)Ca: sensitive test of isospin symmetry-breaking corrections from mirror superallowed 0+ → 0+ transitions

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Mar 14;112(10):102502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.102502. Epub 2014 Mar 12.

Abstract

We report the first branching-ratio measurement of the superallowed 0+→0+β transition from Ca38. The result, 0.7728(16), leads to an ft value of 3062.3(68) s with a relative precision of ±0.2%. This makes possible a high-precision comparison of the ft values for the mirror superallowed transitions, Ca38→38mK and K38m→Ar38, which sensitively tests the isospin symmetry-breaking corrections required to extract Vud, the up-down quark-mixing element of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, from superallowed β decay. The result supports the corrections currently used and points the way to even tighter constraints on CKM unitarity.