|
Home |
The Neutron Spin It turns out that it is tough to study the spin of the free neutron. Neutrons do not hang around long enough, when they are not bound in some nucleus, to study their detailed structure in a high-energy experiment. Their lifetime is on the order of 15 minutes. On the other hand, polarized helium-3 looks like a polarized neutron bound to two unpolarized protons. The proton spins line up anti-parallel due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Our group has been studying polarized helium-3 since the early 1990s, and we are still active in the study of polarized helium-3 to learn about neutron structure. These experiments use polarized electron scattering and are presently being done in Hall A at Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia. At Caltech we have a dedicated polarized noble gas laboratory located on the first floor of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. |
|
