Physicists Capture The Most Precise Measurement Yet of a Neutron's Lifespan - ScienceAlert

This has implications for our understanding of how the first matter in the Universe was created from a soup of protons and neutrons in the minutes after the Big Bang.

"The process by which a neutron 'decays' into a proton – with an emission of a light electron and an almost massless neutrino – is one of the most fascinating processes known to physicists," said nuclear physicist Daniel Salvat of Indiana University Bloomington.

"The effort to measure this value very precisely is significant because understanding the precise lifetime of the neutron can shed light on how the universe developed – as well as allow physicists to discover flaws in our model of the subatomic universe that we know exist but nobody has yet been able to find.".