Neutrons DIE in 14 minutes

#neutrons #bigbang #losalamos Poor neutrons — they don’t even get 15 minutes of fame! Physicists at Los Alamos National Lab trapped Ultracold Neutrons in a bottle to see how long they live! Free Neutrons Are Breaking Records and Confusing Physicists! Why do Neutrons live for exactly 14.629 minutes when in isolation, but forever when they are bound in an atomic nucleus? That is a mystery as old as time, but a good fact for us -- if neutrons did not decay, we wouldn't be here!

Scientists have discovered the exact length of time a neutron will survive before it decays into a proton, an electron, and an anti-neutrino. This confirms the Standard Model of physics which predicts how often neutrons decay. We have known for years that a lonely neutron will die in about 15 minutes dating back to the original measurement of a free neutron’s decay in 1951.

The new experiment, called UCNtau (for "Ultra Cold Neutrons tau", where tau refers to the neutron lifetime), has revealed that the neutron lives 14.629 minutes with an uncertainty of 0.005 minutes. This is a factor of two more precise than previous measurements. While the results do not solve the mystery of why free neutrons live as long as they do, they bring scientists closer to answering this question which has been around since the birth of the universe.

A new measurement— using 38 million neutrons -- the result of years of experimentation in the UNCtau apparatus at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center—is the most precise EVER. The team’s results were published last year in Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

So do neutrons need to take their vitamins to live longer?

5:00 neutrinos should be neutrons obviously 😢

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