Beta decay of the free neutron and hypothesis of intermediate leptoquark bosons

The possibility of the production of virtual leptoquark intermediate bosons in the beta decay of the free neutron has been investigated. It has been shown that, in this process, the channel associated with beta transitions in the right-handed nucleon current can be interpreted in terms of such a mechanism involving scalar leptoquark color bosons with an electric charge of -2/3 and leptoquark multiplets including the left-handed leptons. The possibility of extending this hypothesis by means of the additional assumption that there exists a similar mechanism featuring a leptoquark multiplet including the left-handed u quarks and the right-handed neutrino has been considered. It has been shown that, in this case, additional terms that are equivalent to exotic scalar (pseudoscalar) and tensor versions of weak interaction arise in the effective lepton-hadron Hamiltonian of weak interaction. The existence of such terms does not contradict modern experimental data, and their relative contribution to the general process is expected to be about 0.5% of the contribution from the standard decay mechanism. A precision measurement of electron-neutrino correlations in neutron decay or in allowed nuclear beta transitions would be a crucial test for the above extended hypothesis