Precise measurement of branching ratios in the beta decay of Ca-38
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2015 American Physical Society. We present the full description of a measurement of the branching ratios for the decay of Ca38. This decay includes five allowed 0+1+ branches and a superallowed 0+0+ one. With our new result for the latter, we determine its ft value to be 3062.36.8 s, a result whose precision (0.2%) is comparable to the precision of the 13 well-known 0+0+ transitions used up until now for the determination of Vud, the up-down quark-mixing element of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. The Ca38 superallowed transition thus becomes the first addition to this set of transitions in nearly a decade and the first for which a precise mirror comparison is possible, thus enabling an improved test of the isospin-symmetry-breaking corrections required for the extraction of Vud.