How are heavy elements formed in the universe? Extremely neutron-rich atomic nuclei and their beta-decay rates play an important role in this process. Until now, it has been very difficult to ...

Using some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, an international team including scientists from several U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories has released the highest-precision ...

The matter inside a neutron star consists mostly of neutrons, with a few protons, electrons, and other sub-atomic particles. This matter is so dense that an entire neutron star, with a mass greater ...

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 ...

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can “live” outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our ...

The neutron is a bit of a headache for physics. A neutron is an electrically neutral particle that helps glue protons together in the nucleus of atoms. Inside the atom, it is happily stable. But a ...

(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 ...