49 research outputs found
Observability of an induced electric dipole moment of the neutron from nonlinear QED
It has been shown recently that a neutron placed in an external quasistatic
electric field develops an induced electric dipole moment
due to quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum. A
feasible experiment which could detect such an effect is proposed and described
here. It is shown that the peculiar angular dependence of
on the orientation of the neutron spin leads to a
characteristic asymmetry in polarized neutron scattering by heavy nuclei. This
asymmetry can be of the order of for neutrons with epithermal
energies. For thermalized neutrons from a hot moderator one still expects
experimentally accessible values of the order of . The contribution of
the induced effect to the neutron scattering length is expected to be only one
order of magnitude smaller than that due to the neutron polarizability from its
quark substructure. The experimental observation of this scattering asymmetry
would be the first ever signal of nonlinearity in electrodynamics due to
quantum fluctuations in the QED vacuum
Gravitational Atom in Compactified Extra Dimensions
We consider quantum mechanical effects of the modified Newtonian potential in
the presence of extra compactified dimensions. We develop a method to solve the
resulting Schroedinger equation and determine the energy shifts caused by the
Yukawa-type corrections of the potential. We comment on the possibility of
detecting the modified gravitational bound state Energy spectrum by present day
and future experiments.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
Demonstration of a solid deuterium source of ultra-cold neutrons
Ultra-cold neutrons (UCN), neutrons with energies low enough to be confined
by the Fermi potential in material bottles, are playing an increasing role in
measurements of fundamental properties of the neutron. The ability to
manipulate UCN with material guides and bottles, magnetic fields, and gravity
can lead to experiments with lower systematic errors than have been obtained in
experiments with cold neutron beams. The UCN densities provided by existing
reactor sources limit these experiments. The promise of much higher densities
from solid deuterium sources has led to proposed facilities coupled to both
reactor and spallation neutron sources. In this paper we report on the
performance of a prototype spallation neutron-driven solid deuterium source.
This source produced bottled UCN densities of 145 +/-7 UCN/cm3, about three
times greater than the largest bottled UCN densities previously reported. These
results indicate that a production UCN source with substantially higher
densities should be possible