Muon Capture on ^6Li, ^12C, and ^16O from Ab Initio Nuclear Theory

Muon capture on nuclei is one of the most promising probes of the nuclear electroweak current driving the yet-hypothetical neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) decay. Both processes involve vector and axial-vector currents at finite momentum transfer, q∼ 100 MeV, as well as the induced pseudoscalar and weak-magnetism currents. Comparing measured muon-capture rates with reliable ab initio nuclear-theory predictions could help us validate these currents. To this end, we compute partial muon-capture rates for ^6Li, ^12C and ^16O, feeding the ground and excited states in ^6He, ^12B and ^16N, using ab initio no-core shell model with two- and three-nucleon chiral interactions. We remove the spurious center-of-mass motion by introducing translationally invariant operators and approximate the effect of hadronic two-body currents by Fermi-gas model. We solve the bound-muon wave function from the Dirac wave equations in the Coulomb field created by a finite nucleus. We find that the computed rates to the low-lying states in the final nuclei are in good agreement with the measured counterparts. We highlight sensitivity of some of the transitions to the sub-leading three-nucleon interaction terms. We also compare summed rates to several tens of final states with the measured total capture rates and note that we slightly underestimate the total rate with this simple approach due to limited range of excitation energies.