DETERMINATION OF THE WEAK-COUPLING CONSTANTS FROM FREE-NEUTRON DECAY EXPERIMENTS

Both the neutron lifetime and the neutron P-decay asymmetry have recently been measured with high accuracy. A joint evaluation of these measurements gives values for the weak coupling constants gv and gA. We investigate implications of these measurements for the conserved vector current hypothesis, the unitarity of the weak quark mixing matrix, hyperon decay and SUsyetry, the existence of right-handed currents, the solar-neutrino problem, and big bang cosmology. © 1990 The Japan Society of Applied Physics.