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This paper, by the team at the Max Planck Institute

May 25, 2018 by Kimberly Parks

This paper, by the team at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, finds that in the presence of neutrons, the probability of a neutron decay is 1 in 6,000 in the presence of dark matter. They show that the probability of decays by neutrons in the presence of dark matter is 2.5 times higher than the probability of one decays by neutrons.

To understand why this is, let's consider a situation that we can't really know about. Suppose a neutron has a half-life of 1.8 days. It will only decay once, when it is in the right state of decay. That means that in the long-term the decay time could be as small as a few seconds (the time period the neutron emits should be smaller than that of the atom's nucleus). If one neutron gets neutered by dark matter it will end up on its own – it will simply vanish.

That's wrong, because if one neutron has a half-life of 1 day, the probability of an electron having a half-life of more than 1 day is almost zero. The probability of an electron having a half-life of more than 1 day is almost one in 15,000.

What if the half-life of a neutron is 0.4 years (it might not be a good way to describe it), because every single neutrino ever that crosses the equator gets destroyed by the collision (which, again, is a small fraction of the entire mass of the universe)? Well, if the half-life of a neutron is 0.4 years, the probability is very, very small.

Of course, the half-life of a neutron is very small. But to say that it "looks like" a particle of dark matter is to say that everything around it is in some sort of way a particle of dark matter.

The same is true of the electron. If it had a half-life of 1 year, the probability of an electron having a half-life of more than 1 year is almost zero. And there are many ways to explain this. In the case of an electron, this could be a simple matter of chance, or something of the sort, or something that is somehow completely out of physics.

However, if the half-life of a neutron is 1 year, it is less than 1 in 1,000. The actual probability of a single electron having a half-life of more than 1 year is almost zero. If the half-life