Iowa State University researchers have helped demonstrate the existence of a subatomic structure once thought unlikely to exist.
James Vary, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Andrey Shirokov, a visiting scientist, together with an international team, used sophisticated supercomputer simulations to show the quasi-stable existence of a tetraneutron, a structure comprised of four neutrons (subatomic particles with no charge).
The new finding was published in Physical Review Letters, a publication of the American Physical Society, on October 28.
On their own, neutrons are very unstable and will convert into protons—positively charged subatomic particles—after ten minutes. Groups of two or three neutrons do not form a stable structure, but the new simulations in this research demonstrate that four neutrons together can form a resonance, a structure stable for a period of time before decaying.
For the tetraneutron, this lifetime is only 5×10^(-22) seconds (a tiny fraction of a billionth of a nanosecond). Though this time seems very short, it is long enough to study, and provides a new avenue for exploring the strong forces between neutrons.
"This opens up a whole new line of research," Vary said. "Studying the tetraneutron will help us understand interneutron forces including previously unexplored features of the unstable two-neutron and three-neutron systems."
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