Rare ^40K Decay with Implications for Fundamental Physics and Geochronology

Potassium-40 is a widespread, naturally occurring isotope whose radioactivity impacts subatomic rare-event searches, nuclear structure theory, and estimated geological ages. A predicted electron-capture decay directly to the ground state of argon-40 has never been observed. The KDK (potassium decay) collaboration reports strong evidence of this rare decay mode. A blinded analysis reveals a nonzero ratio of intensities of ground-state electron-captures (IEC0) over excited-state ones (IEC*) of stat IEC0/IEC* = 0.00951 sys 0.002210.0010 (68% C.L.), with the null hypothesis rejected at 4 & sigma;. In terms of stat branching ratio, this signal yields IEC0 = 0.098%1 prediction, with consequences for various fields [L. Hariasz et al., companion paper, Phys. Rev. C 108, 014327 (2023)]. sys 0.023%1 0.010%, roughly half of the commonly used