Why very cold neutrons could be useful for neutron-antineutron oscillation searches

Neutron–Antineutron Oscillation as a Signal of CP Violation

Assuming the Lorentz and CPT invariances we show that neutron-antineutron oscillation implies breaking of CP along with baryon number violation – i.e. two of Sakharov conditions for baryogenesis. The oscillation is produced by the unique operator in the effective Hamiltonian. This operator mixing neutron and antineutron preserves charge conjugation C and breaks P and T. External magnetic field ...

Neutron-antineutron Oscillations

Experimental observation of nucleon instability is one of the missing key components required for the explanation of baryon asymmetry of the universe. Proton decays with the modes and rates predicted by(B−L)-conserving schemes of Grand Unification are not observed experimentally. There are reasons to believe that (B−L) might not be conserved in nature, thus leading to the nucleon decay into lep...

Motivation for a Neutron-Antineutron Oscillation Search in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Grand unified theories generally predict the existence of baryon number nonconservation, manifesting itself in processes like proton decay and neutron-antineutron (n-n) oscillation. Experimental nonobservation of proton decay has led to the development of several experimental searches for n-n oscillations. To date, this phenomenon has never been detected, setting an experimental lower limit on ...

The reflection of very cold neutrons from diamond powder nanoparticles

We study possibility of efficient reflection of very cold neutrons (VCN) from powders of nanoparticles. In particular, we measured the scattering of VCN at a powder of diamond nanoparticles as a function of powder sample thickness, neutron velocity and scattering angle. We observed extremely intense scattering of VCN even off thin powder samples. This agrees qualitatively with the model of inde...

Can Specification Searches Be Useful for Hypothesis Generation?