{"id":147181,"date":"2022-09-28T23:23:32","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T04:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/near-threshold-resonance-helps-explain-a-controversial-measurement-of-exotic-decay-in-beryllium-11"},"modified":"2022-09-28T23:23:32","modified_gmt":"2022-09-29T04:23:32","slug":"near-threshold-resonance-helps-explain-a-controversial-measurement-of-exotic-decay-in-beryllium-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/near-threshold-resonance-helps-explain-a-controversial-measurement-of-exotic-decay-in-beryllium-11","title":{"rendered":"Near-threshold resonance helps explain a controversial measurement of exotic decay in beryllium-11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/near-threshold-resonance-helps-explain-a-controversial-measurement-of-exotic-decay-in-beryllium-112.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Most mass in everyday matter around us resides in protons and neutrons inside the atomic nucleus. However, the lifetime of a free neutron\u2014one not bounded to a nucleus\u2014is unstable, decaying by a process called beta decay. For neutrons, beta decay involves the emission of a proton, an electron, and an anti-neutrino. Beta decay is a common process.<\/p>\n<p>However, scientists have some significant uncertainties about the neutron lifetime and about the neutron decaying inside a nucleus that leads to a proton emission. This is called beta-delayed proton emission. There are only a few neutron-rich nuclei for which beta-delayed proton emission is energetically allowed. The radioactive nucleus beryllium-11 (<sup>11 <\/sup>Be), an isotope that consists of 4 <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/protons\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">protons<\/a> and 7 <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/neutrons\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neutrons<\/a>, with its last neutron very weakly bound, is among those rare cases. Scientists recently observed a surprising large beta-delayed proton decay rate for <sup>11 <\/sup>Be. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery of an exotic near-threshold <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/resonance\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">resonance<\/a> that favors proton decay is a key for explaining the beta-delayed proton decay of <sup>11 <\/sup>Be. The discovery is also a remarkable and not fully understood manifestation of quantum many-body physics. Many-body physics involves interacting <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/subatomic+particles\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">subatomic particles<\/a>. While scientists may know the physics that apply to each particle, the complete system can be too complex to understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most mass in everyday matter around us resides in protons and neutrons inside the atomic nucleus. However, the lifetime of a free neutron\u2014one not bounded to a nucleus\u2014is unstable, decaying by a process called beta decay. For neutrons, beta decay involves the emission of a proton, an electron, and an anti-neutrino. Beta decay is a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}