The proposed project has as its first objective the completion of the analysis of seminal experiments on the diffusion of muonic hydrogen atoms (up and ud) in H2 and D2 gas, and the use of these results to design and undertake an experiment to measure the rate of the reaction up>nv in the triplet state of the up atom. The purpose of this experiment is to measure the pseudoscalar coupling constant in muon capture to 10% accuracy by a method independent of radiative muon capture experiments. Techniques involving scintillation counters and neutron sensitive liquid methane-filled proportional chambers will be used. The second purpose of the project, to be carried out simultaneously with the muon capture studies described above, is to establish the existence of 2S state metastability in muonic boron, and to begin the measurement of parity non-conserving (PNC) effects in muonic boron. The PNC experiment will make use of the directional correlation between the decay electron of the muon and the M1 photon emitted from the metastable muonic boron atoms. Techniques involving scintillation and solid-state detectors will be used.
