1210.6545 (V. A. Andreev et al.)

Measurement of Muon Capture on the Proton to 1% Precision and
Determination of the Pseudoscalar Coupling g_P    [PDF]

V. A. Andreev, T. I. Banks, R. M. Carey, T. A. Case, S. M. Clayton, K. M. Crowe, J. Deutsch, J. Egger, S. J. Freedman, V. A. Ganzha, T. Gorringe, F. E. Gray, D. W. Hertzog, M. Hildebrandt, P. Kammel, B. Kiburg, S. Knaack, P. A. Kravtsov, A. G. Krivshich, B. Lauss, K. R. Lynch, E. M. Maev, O. E. Maev, F. Mulhauser, C. Petitjean, G. E. Petrov, R. Prieels, G. N. Schapkin, G. G. Semenchuk, M. A. Soroka, V. Tishchenko, A. A. Vasilyev, A. A. Vorobyov, M. E. Vznuzdaev, P. Winter

The MuCap experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute has measured the rate L_S of muon capture from the singlet state of the muonic hydrogen atom to a precision of 1%. A muon beam was stopped in a time projection chamber filled with 10-bar, ultra-pure hydrogen gas. Cylindrical wire chambers and a segmented scintillator barrel detected electrons from muon decay. L_S is determined from the difference between the mu- disappearance rate in hydrogen and the free muon decay rate. The result is based on the analysis of 1.2 10^10 mu- decays, from which we extract the capture rate L_S = (714.9 +- 5.4(stat) +- 5.1(syst)) s^-1 and derive the proton's pseudoscalar coupling g_P(q^2_0 = -0.88 m^2_mu) = 8.06 +- 0.55.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.6545