Parity violation in neutron capture on the proton: Determining the weak pion–nucleon coupling

Abstract

We investigate the parity-violating analyzing power in neutron capture on the proton at thermal energies in the framework of chiral effective field theory. By combining this analysis with a previous analysis of parity violation in proton–proton scattering, we are able to extract the size of the weak pion–nucleon coupling constant. The uncertainty is significant and dominated by the experimental error which is expected to be reduced soon.