An observation of neutron-antineutron oscillations ($n-\overline{n}$), which violate both $B$ and $B-L$ conservation, would constitute a scientific discovery of fundamental importance to physics and cosmology. A stringent upper bound on its transition rate would make an important contribution to our understanding of the baryon asymmetry of the Universe by eliminating the postsphaleron baryogenesis scenario in the light quark sector. We show that one can design an experiment using slow neutrons that in principle can reach the required sensitivity of ${\tau }_{n-\overline{n}}\sim {10}^{10}\mathrm{s}$ in the oscillation time, an improvement of $\sim {10}^4$ in the oscillation probability relative to the existing limit for free neutrons. The improved statistical accuracy needed to reach this sensitivity can be achieved by allowing both the neutron and antineutron components of the developing superposition state to coherently reflect from mirrors. We present a quantitative analysis of this scenario and show that, for sufficiently small transverse momenta of $n/\overline{n}$ and for certain choices of nuclei for the $n/\overline{n}$ guide material, the relative phase shift of the $n$ and $\overline{n}$ components upon reflection and the $\overline{n}$ annihilation rate can be small enough to maintain sufficient coherence to benefit from the greater phase space acceptance the mirror provides.

• Received 1 October 2018
• Revised 6 February 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.221802

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society