The bracketed diagram energies are nuclear, so subtract one electron rest energy from each parent-to-daughter energy difference. The three kinetic-energy endpoints areThe observed partial-rate ratios are and .
To obtain the simple Sargent-law estimates, define an effective strength by , using the same normalization . ThenThus the two forbidden branches have effective strengths of the same broad order, whereas the N ground-state branch is highly suppressed relative to the allowed F branch after this approximate fifth-power kinematic scaling. The first comparison involves mirror transitions with related nuclear configurations; order-of-magnitude similarity is reasonable, without expecting exact equality from this estimate.
These effective strengths must not be confused with precisely extracted microscopic reduced nuclear matrix elements. Both N and Ne ground-state branches are first-forbidden unique, for which the first-forbidden unique beta-decay phase space contains an additional factor proportional to . In the massless, no-Coulomb limit this gives , so using the same microscopic unique-forbidden normalization for those two branches instead yieldsComparing a unique-forbidden reduced operator directly with an allowed reduced operator also requires a convention for its powers of length and momentum. The number is consequently an effective Sargent-normalized suppression, not a universal dimensionless ratio between different operator ranks. Electron-mass and opposite-sign Coulomb corrections matter, particularly for the low-energy F branch. The data justify approximate strength comparisons; they do not fix precision nuclear matrix elements without these extra ingredients.