Dispelling the curse of the neutron skin in atomic parity violation

Understand

We perform calculations for the neutron skin of nuclei and its contribution to atomic parity non-conservation (PNC) in many isotopes of Cs, Ba, Sm, Dy, Yb, Tl, Pb, Bi, Fr, Ra.

• Three problems are addressed: i) Neutron-skin induced errors to single-isotope PNC, ii) Possibility to measure neutron skin using atomic PNC, iii) Neutron-skin induced errors for ratios of PNC effects in different isotopes.
• In the latter case the correlations in the neutron skin values for different isotopes lead to cancelations of the errors; this makes the isotopic ratio method a competitive tool in a search for new physics beyond the standard model.