Neutrons decay when not bound to an atom. The decay time has been measured to be around T = 880s. There are two main methods for measuring the neutron decays, the bottle method, and the beam method. Interestingly these two methods give different decay times. This latest measurement [1] concretes this difference even more by measuring the decay time with the bottle method with even greater certainty. This difference may come down to the way that these methods measure the decay, either counting neutrons or protons. As such it has been theorized that perhaps neutrons sometimes decay to dark matter [2], which would explain this difference. While more data is needed an alternative is another method to verify the difference. One technique would be to detect native neutrons in the atmosphere [3]. Perhaps measurements like this would help us understand what is going on when neutrons decay.
0:00 - Intro
1:25 - Bottle method
2:00 - Beam method
2:36 - Latest results
3:05 - Space method
4:05 - Dark matter decay
[1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.162501
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.01124.pdf
[3] https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.104.045501
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