The asymmetry of positrons in the K+ -t p+v, p+ + e+vei7, decay chain was measured in a search for right-handed weak currents in AS = 1 semileptonic decay. High-intensity low-background monoenergetic polarized muons of 236 MeV/c momentum resulting from kaon decay at rest were directly extracted from a primary production target which was hit by a proton beam of the KEK 12-GeV proton synchrotron. Muons were stopped in a pure-aluminum plate, and the energy-integrated asymmetry of the decay positrons with respect to the incoming muon direction was determined to high precision. The observed asymmetry yielded ( P , = -0.9996 2c 0.0030(stat) f 0.0048(syst). This result revealed no evidence of right-handed currents in this kaon-decay chain, and set a stringent bound on the mass of the right-handed weak boson. PACS numberis): 13.20.Eb, 12.60.Cn, 13.35.B~ 69 @ 1994 The American Physical Society 70 M. AOKI et al. 50 to the conventional weak boson (WL), they assume another weak intermediate boson (WR) which couples to the right-handed weak currents, replacing the standard gauge group s U ( 2 )~ @ U(1) with s U ( 2 )~ @ SU(2)R 8 % U(1). In general, these weak bosons are a superposition of mass eigenstates ( W I ,~) , which can be written as WL = WI cos 6 + W2 sin C, WR = -Wl sin C + W2 cos (, where 6 is the mixing angle. Then, the left handedness in the low-energy region can be attributed to mw, >> mw; and/or the smallness of C, where mw, is the mass of W,.That is, right-handed phenomena in the low-energy region are suppressed by c2 = (mw, /mw2)*. Regarding the coupling of WR to a quark c G r e n t , a right-handed Cabibbo angle (OR), which is an analogue to the ordinary Cabibbo angle (OL) [23], is also introduced. Although manifest LRS models [24] require that sineR = singL, nonequality (sineR # sineL) can be postulated in general [25,26,161. 1n-the case-of manifest left-right symmetry, there is no physical difference between the kaon-and the pion-decay positron-asymmetry experiments. However, if OR # OL and I sin OR I -. 1. the kaon decay experiments are very