Publication Type
Journal
Journal Name
Physical Review Letters
Publication Date
Page Number
202502
Volume
106
Issue
20
Abstract
We report the microscopic origins of the anomalously suppressed beta decay of 14C to 14N using the ab initio no-core shell model with the Hamiltonian from the chiral effective field theory including three-nucleon force terms. The three-nucleon force induces unexpectedly large cancellations within the p shell between contributions to beta decay, which reduce the traditionally large contributions from the nucleon-nucleon interactions by an order of magnitude, leading to the long lifetime of 14C.