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.

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 ...

A physics experiment performed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has enhanced scientists' understanding of how free neutrons decay into other particles. The work provides ...

An international team of researchers recently measured the lifetime of a neutron outside of an atomic nucleus with extraordinary precision. By their measurements, the neutron survived for 14.629 ...

A new "bathtub" experiment has allowed physicists to measure the lifetime of a free neutron far more precisely than ever before. The breakthrough could help probe the fringes of the Standard Model of ...

A few days ago I wrote about how different measurements of the Hubble parameter gave results that didn't quite agree. It's not the only example of such an experimental disagreement. In fact, one of ...

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 ...