Radiative Corrections to Superallowed β Decays in Effective Field Theory

Vincenzo Cirigliano, Wouter Dekens, Jordy de Vries, Stefano Gandolfi, Martin Hoferichter, Emanuele Mereghetti

Phys.Rev.Lett. 133 (2024) 21, 211801
[arXiv: 2405.18469]

The accuracy of Vud determinations from superallowed β decays critically hinges on control over radiative corrections. Recently, substantial progress has been made on the single-nucleon, universal corrections, while nucleus-dependent effects, typically parameterized by a quantity δNS, are much less well constrained. Here, we lay out a program to evaluate this correction from effective field theory (EFT), highlighting the dominant terms as predicted by the EFT power counting. Moreover, we compare the results to a dispersive representation of δNS and show that the expected momentum scaling applies even in the case of low-lying intermediate states. Our EFT framework paves the way towards ab-initio calculations of δNS and thereby addresses the dominant uncertainty in Vud.

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