Abstract. Beta decay in exotic nuclei can lead to multi-particle final states. This contribution discusses briefly what decay mechanisms may enter in such decays and presents, on behalf of the IS541 collaboration at ISOLDE/CERN, preliminary data from a search for the beta-delayed proton decay of the halo nucleus 11 Be.
Beta-particle decay mechanismThe Q-values for beta-decays increase as one moves towards the driplines and eventually become larger than the particle separation energies in the daughter nuclei. This allows population of final states containing, apart from the beta particle and the associated (anti)neutrino, one or more particles (protons, neutrons or heavier particles) in continuum states and a recoiling final nucleus. Such processes allow many different physics questions to be probed experimentally -see [1,2] for recent reviews -and are normally referred to as beta-delayed particle emission. However, this name suggests a two-step process: the beta decay feeding resonance states in the daughter nucleus that subsequently decay by particle emission. The other possible decay mechanism, beta decays feeding the continuum states directly, deserves consideration as well.Some indication for decays going directly into the continuum exist for halo nuclei, see [3][4][5] and references therein for details on the halo structure. The two-neutron halo nuclei 6 He and 11 Li appear both to have beta-delayed deuteron emission taking place directly into the continuum [1,6]. For 11 Li this process has a branching ratio of the order of 10 −4 , the low value mainly being due to the small energy window, whereas cancellation effects reduces the branching ratio for 6 He down to the 10 −6 level. The simple-minded model of the decays is that one of the two halo neutrons beta-decay into a proton and combines with the other one to form a deuteron. A complicating factor in the theoretical description of these two decays is therefore the "two neutron to deuteron" overlap that is sensitive to the correlations between the two neutrons. This is an interesting physics problem, but if the focus is on investigating the decay mechanism a much cleaner case would be the beta-delayed proton decay of a single-neutron halo nucleus.
The 11 Be(βp) decayThe most favourable case is 11 Be(βp). Estimates of the branching ratio indicates that this will be a very rare process [7] due to the low energy available, see table 1; the branching ratio will in most a