Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/paper-1/section-b/b7/d/solution

The nuclear beta decay is fast compared with the electronic orbital timescale. In the sudden approximation, the electronic wavefunction does not have time to change during the increase from to . The subsequent probability of a particular daughter energy eigenstate is therefore its squared overlap with the initial state.
For the final state, write and . The sudden hydrogenic charge change gives the amplitude
Thus
The final states have spherical harmonics , whereas the initial state is proportional to . Their angular overlap vanishes by orthogonality. Accordingly in the ideal spherically symmetric sudden-change model. Nuclear recoil or interactions with the emitted particles can produce small corrections. This is an overlap selection rule for a sudden change, not a photon-induced electric dipole transition.

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