The Electric Quadrupole Interaction in Beta-Decay

Abstract

Although it has been customary in beta-decay theory to assume that the field in which the decay electron moves is spherically symmetrical, there is often a strong quadrupole interaction, comparable in magnitude at the nuclear surface to the central interaction. This will couple together different angular momentum states of both the electron and the daughter nucleus. In this work the wave functions of these coupled states have been obtained by an essentially exact solution of the Dirac equation for an electron in a non-central potential. It was found that the coupling between different daughter nuclear states was 1% at the very most, which is insufficient to account for some observed anomalies in branched decays of strongly deformed nuclei.