https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13470-6
Regular Article
The Monument experiment: ordinary muon capture studies for
decay
1
Physik-Institut, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
2
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
3
Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing, China
4
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
5
Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany
6
IRFU, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
7
KU Leuven, Institute for Nuclear and Radiation Physics, Leuven, Belgium
8
Research Center on Nuclear Physics, Osaka University, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan
9
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
10
Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland
11
Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
12
Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla, Finland
13
International Centre for Advanced Training and Research in Physics (CIFRA), Bucharest-Magurele, Romania
a
elisabetta.bossio@cea.fr
b
elizabeth.mondragon@tum.de
Received:
13
April
2024
Accepted:
7
October
2024
Published online:
20
November
2024
The Monument experiment measures ordinary muon capture (OMC) on isotopes relevant for neutrinoless double-beta () decay and nuclear astrophysics. OMC is a particularly attractive tool for improving the theoretical description of
decay. It involves similar momentum transfers and allows testing the virtual transitions involved in
decay against experimental data. During the 2021 campaign, Monument studied OMC on
Se and
Ba, the isotopes relevant for next-generation
decay searches, like Legend and nEXO. The experimental setup has been designed to accurately extract the total and partial muon capture rates, which requires precise reconstruction of energies and time-dependent intensities of the OMC-related
rays. The setup also includes a veto counter system to allow selecting a clean sample of OMC events. This work provides a detailed description of the Monument setup operated during the 2021 campaign, its two DAQ systems, calibration and analysis approaches, and summarises the achieved detector performance. Future improvements are also discussed.
© The Author(s) 2024
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