Analysis of the Proton Quasi-Penning Trap for the BL3 Experiment

The free neutron lifetime is a crucial input parameter in big bang nucleosynthesis calculations and in our understanding of the weak force, yet discrepancies in its measurement have persisted for over a decade. The two primary classes of experiments, the "bottle" and "beam" methods, have disagreed by over 4σ. To better understand this discrepancy, the newest generation neutron lifetime measurements are pushing for higher precision. In order to help achieve this goal for the BL3 experiment, the next generation in-beam neutron lifetime measurement, an analysis was performed to quantify the sensitivity of the proton quasi-penning trap's effective trap length to variations in its constituent electrodes' dimensions utilizing COMSOL Multiphysics. The materials to be presented in this talk include a description of the COMSOL simulation, the method by which trap length sensitivity was determined, the allowed sensitivity tolerance to remain within the desired overall lifetime uncertainty limits, and future work to calculate corrections from these manufacturing variations.