
How long do neutrons live? Physicists close in on decades-old puzzle - headalgorithm
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01203-9
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krasotkin
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can weigh in-- I'm just speculating from a
lay perspective. The bottle configuration likely means less states are
available due to the confines of the system, and these states are higher
energy. I'm thinking something like the Casimir effect, where the boundaries
of the system impose conditions that limit the total number of states. Could
this explain the discrepancy? Something that could potentially corroborate
this idea is comparing those boundary conditions. Do neutrons in larger
"bottles" decay slower, and neutrons in smaller "bottles" decay into protons
even faster?

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pontifier
I have been fascinated by neutrons for quite some time. I'd not heard of
neutron bottles before. Researching about how ultra cold neutrons are trapped
was quite interesting, as I had not thought it possible that they could be
held in any sort of container.

