Does the proton decay? While this was a famous prediction of Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) developed in the 1970s and 1980s, experimentalists have ruled it out—or rather, put lower limits on its mean ...

Nuclear physicist Evangeline Downie hadn’t planned to study one of the thorniest puzzles of the proton. But when opportunity knocked, Downie couldn’t say no. “It’s the proton,” she exclaims. The ...

Since the discovery of radioactivity in the 19th century, humanity has been forced to reckon with an uncomfortable but sobering truth: much of the matter we find today will eventually decay away. This ...

AT SOME point in our lives, most of us learn that atoms are comprised of three types of particle: neutrons, protons and electrons. Each has distinct properties. The electron and proton have opposite ...

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists accelerate particles to the highest energies and in the greatest numbers that humanity has ever achieved. We smash them together at greater than ...

For the first time in more than thirty years, the heaviest nucleus decaying via proton emission has been measured. The previous similar breakthrough was achieved in 1996. The radioactive decay of ...

Researchers have observed a rare nuclear decay. Namely, the team measured low-kinetic-energy protons emitted after the beta decay of a neutron-rich nucleus beryllium-11. Researchers from the National ...

Physicists have failed to find disintegrating protons, throwing into limbo the beloved theory that the forces of nature were unified at the beginning of time. For 20 years, physicists in Japan have ...