A research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) is the first ever to observe a beta-delayed neutron emission ...

A free neutron outside a nucleus is not stable. It undergoes beta decay at a probability. Over time, the number of free neutrons decreases exponentially at a time constant, which is called the neutron ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. How long is the lifespan of a free neutron? Different experiments provide contradicting answers.

(Inside Science) — Exactly how long a neutron lives is currently under debate. Now researchers suggest this mystery could be solved if neutrons sometimes decay into particles of dark matter, the ...

Dark-decay search: the UCNA experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory For more than 20 years, physicists have been unable to explain why two types of experiment yield different values for the ...

Nuclear puzzle: In the nucleus, neutrons can be stable, but free neutrons decay after a short period. Exactly how short is in dispute because experiments on neutrons stored in bottles and neutrons in ...

Neutrons are among the basic building blocks of matter. As long as they are part of a stable atomic nucleus, they can stay there for arbitrary periods of time. However, the situation is different for ...

When physicists strip neutrons from atomic nuclei, put them in a bottle, then count how many remain there after some time, they infer that neutrons radioactively decay in 14 minutes and 39 seconds, on ...