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 ...

A research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) is the first ever to observe a beta-delayed neutron emission from fluorine-25, a rare, unstable nuclide. Using the FRIB Decay Station ...

In recent years, some large physics experiments worldwide have been trying to gather evidence of a nuclear process known as neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay. This is a rare process that entails ...

Scientists have gained insights into the weak nuclear force from new, more sensitive studies of the beta decays of the 'mirror' nuclei lithium-8 and boron-8. The weak nuclear force drives the process ...

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 ...

Researchers have observed a rare nuclear decay. Namely, the team measured low-kinetic-energy protons emitted after the beta decay of a neutron-rich nucleus beryllium-11. Researchers from the National ...

Since the discovery of radioactivity in the 19th century, humanity has been forced to reckon with an uncomfortable but sobering truth: much of the matter we find today will eventually decay away. This ...

A research collaboration between the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams recently ran an experiment that sheds light on the forces holding together atomic nuclei ...

For the first time, scientists observe a new and rare decay mode where oxygen-13 breaks into three helium nuclei and a proton following beta decay. Scientists have previously observed interesting ...

Does the proton decay? While this was a famous prediction of Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) developed in the 1970s and 1980s, experimentalists have ruled it out—or rather, put lower limits on its mean ...

Radioactive decay is the strange and almost mystical ability for one element to naturally and spontaneously transmute into another. In the process, those elements tend to emit deadly forms of ...