How long do neutrons live? Physicists close in on decades-old puzzle

One way of clocking the neutron’s lifetime is to put some of the particles in a bottle and count how many are left after a period of time. At the meeting, physicist Zhaowen Tang of the Los Alamos lab described how researchers could put a particle detector inside a bottle neutron trap and count neutrons using both methods. In the meantime, the NIST beam experiment has been gathering fresh data since last year, using sensitive detectors and other components that will make it more precise than previous runs — measuring the neutron lifetime to within one second rather than three to four seconds as has happened so far.

Source: www.nature.com