A general analysis of the sensitivities of neutron β-decay experiments to manifestations of possible interaction beyond the standard model is carried out. In a consistent fashion, we take into account all known radiative and recoil corrections arising in the standard model. This provides a description of angular correlations in neutron decay in terms of one parameter, which is accurate to the level of $~{10}^{-5}$. Based on this general expression, we present an analysis of the sensitivities to new physics for selected neutron decay experiments. We emphasize that the usual parametrization of experiments in terms of the tree-level coefficients $a,A$, and B is inadequate when the experimental sensitivities are at the same or higher level relative to the size of the corrections to the tree-level description.

• Received 3 October 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.73.035501