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Origin of the anomalous long lifetime of ¹⁴C
P Maris1, J P Vary, P Navrátil
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011-3160, USA.
Abstract:
We report the microscopic origins of the anomalously suppressed beta decay of ¹⁴C to ¹⁴N using the ab initio no-core shell model with the Hamiltonian from the chiral effective field theory including three-nucleon force terms. The three-nucleon force induces unexpectedly large cancellations within the p shell between contributions to beta decay, which reduce the traditionally large contributions from the nucleon-nucleon interactions by an order of magnitude, leading to the long lifetime of ¹⁴C.
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