A Discussion on parity non-conservation - The measurement of electron-neutrino angular correlations

Previous speakers have already emphasized the importance of electron-neutrino angular correlations in identifying the basic interactions in β-decay. We have also seen that there are some serious inconsistencies in the experimental situation. At the same time I should like to say that I can see no strong reason to reject any of these results. In this talk I propose to describe some of the difficulties one encounters in this kind of work and to illustrate these with a description of the experiment on 23Ne. There are three observables one can use to find the electron-neutrino correlation: the electron energy E, the recoil momentum r, and the angle θ between the electron and recoil rays. Measurements of the distribution in θ or r alone will suffice, but it is better to measure these in pairs, for reasons I shall give presently. Possible combinations are: