Measuring the rate of muon capture in hydrogen provides one of the most direct ways to study the axial current of the nucleon. The MuCap experiment uses a negative muon beam stopped in a time projection chamber operated with ultra-pure hydrogen gas. Surrounded by a decay electron detector, the lifetime of muons in hydrogen can be measured to determine the singlet capture rate Lambda_s to a final precision of 1%. The capture rate determines the nucleon's pseudoscalar form factor g_p. A first result, g_p = 7.3 +- 1.1, has been published and the final analysis of the full statistics will reduce the error by a factor of up to 3. Muon capture on the deuteron probes the weak axial current in the two-nucleon system. Within the framework of effective field theories the calculation of such two-nucleon processes involving the axial current requires the knowledge of one additional low energy constant which can be extracted from the doublet capture rate Lambda_d. The same constant then allows to model-independently calculate related processes such as solar pp-fusion or neutrino-deuteron scattering. The MuSun experiment will deduce Lambda_d to better than 1.5%. The experiment uses the MuCap detection setup with a new time projection chamber operated with deuterium at 30K and several hardware upgrades. The system is currently fully commissioned and the main physics data taking will start in 2011.
Categories: nucl-ex hep-ex