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  • Open Access

Role of Spin-Isospin Symmetries in Nuclear β-Decays

Simone Salvatore Li Muli1,*, Tor R. Djärv2,†, Christian Forssén1,‡, and Daniel R. Phillips3,1,§

  • *Contact author: simone.limuli@chalmers.se
  • †Contact author: djarvtr@ornl.gov
  • ‡Contact author: christian.forssen@chalmers.se
  • §Contact author: phillid1@ohio.edu
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 242501 – Published 17 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vk51-b476

Abstract

A century ago, Wigner’s SU(4) symmetry was introduced to explain the properties of atomic nuclei. Despite recent revived interest, its impact on nuclear structure, transitions, and reactions has not been fully explored. Here, we show that a variety of high-fidelity nuclear interactions predict nuclear states that have ≥90% probability of being in a single SU(4) irreducible representation. Meanwhile, our analysis of axial current operators in chiral effective field theory (χEFT) reveals that one-body currents at low momentum transfer act only within SU(4) irreducible representations, while two-body currents connect different representations. These selection rules interfere with the expected convergence pattern of the χEFT expansion and explain key phenomenological observations, e.g., the unnaturally large two-body corrections to the axial-current matrix elements in eight-body nuclei.

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  65. The only exception is the irrep [321], see Table 2, but our conclusions are unchanged even in that case.

  66. Note that the isospin raising and lowering operators are defined as τ±=τx±iτy.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 242501– Published 17 June, 2026
  • Received 31 March 2025
  • Revised 1 December 2025
  • Accepted 2 April 2026
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