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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The neutron-rich oxygen isotopes oxygen-27 and oxygen-28 exist as very short-lived resonances, report scientists based on the first observation of their decay into oxygen-24 and three and four ...

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 ...

All the matter we know of in our Universe is made of both fundamental and composite particles. However, only a few of the fundamental particles are observed to be stable and not to decay into other ...

Scientists have found evidence of alpha particles at the surface of neutron-rich heavy nuclei, providing new insights into the structure of neutron stars, as well as the process of alpha decay.

Neutron stars are some of the weirdest cosmic objects, and the greatest mysteries lie deep in their hearts. Neutron stars' surface gravities are so intense that the largest "mountains" are only a few ...