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Missing Neutrons May Lead a Secret Life as Dark Matter

Missing Neutrons May Lead a Secret Life as Dark Matter
Neutrons, the mundane-seeming inhabitants of atoms, could be hiding a secret connection to dark matter, according to a new proposal.


Scientists are pretty sure the universe contains more matter than the stuff we can see, and their best guess is that it takes the form of invisible particles. What if neutrons are decaying into these invisible particles? This idea, put forward by University of California, San Diego, physicists Bartosz Fornal and Benjamin Grinstein in a paper posted this month to the physics preprint site, would explain why one type of neutron experiment consistently measures a different value than the other. If true, it could also provide the first way to access the dark matter particles physicists have long been seeking to no avail.

The idea has already gripped many researchers making neutron lifetime measurements, and some have quickly scrambled to look for evidence of it in their experiments. If neutrons are turning into dark matter, the process could also produce gamma-ray photons, according to Fornal and Grinstein’s calculations. “We have some germanium gamma-ray detectors lying around,” says Christopher Morris, who runs neutron experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By serendipity, he and his team just recently installed a large tank to collect neutrons on their way from the start of the experiment to the point where physicists try to measure their lifetimes. This tank provided a large holding cell where many neutrons might decay into dark particles, if the process in fact occurs, and produce gamma-rays as a by-product. “When we heard about this paper, we took our detector and set it up next to our big tank and started looking for gamma rays.” He and his team are still analyzing the results of this trial, but hope to have a paper out in a few weeks reporting on what they found.

Only one of the two types of neutron decay experiments would be sensitive to neutrons decaying into dark matter. This type, called “bottle experiments,” essentially puts a given number of neutrons into a “bottle” with magnetic walls that holds them inside, then counts how many are left after a certain amount of time. Through many measurements the researchers can calculate how long an average neutron lives.

The other type of experiment looks for the main product of neutron decays. Through a well-known process called beta decay, a neutron outside of an atomic nucleus will break down into a proton, an electron and an antimatter neutrino. So-called “beam” experiments shoot a beam of neutrons into a magnetic trap that catches positively charged protons. Researchers count how many neutrons go in and how many protons come out after a given time, then infer the average time it takes a neutron to decay.

Both classes of experiments find neutrons can last for only about 15 minutes outside of atoms. But bottle experiments measure an average of 879.6 seconds plus or minus 0.6 second, according to the Particle Data Group, an international statistics-keeping collaboration. Beam experiments get a value of 888.0 seconds plus or minus 2.0 seconds. The 8.4-second difference may not seem like much, but it is larger than either of the calculations’ margins of error—which are based on the experimenters’ understanding of all the sources of uncertainty in their measurements. The difference leaves the two figures with a statistically significant “4-sigma” deviation. Experimenters behind both methods have scoured their setups for overlooked problems and sources of uncertainty, with no luck so far.

But if neutrons can transform in more ways than just beta decay, it would explain why bottle and beam experiments do not find the same answers. Fornal and Grinstein suggest that occasionally neutrons turn into some type of dark particle, undetectable by traditional means. The bottle experiments would then measure a slightly shorter lifetime for the neutron than beam experiments, because the former would be counting the dark matter decays in addition to the beta decays—and thus detecting a larger number of total decays in any given time period. The beam setup, however, only measures how long it takes neutrons to turn into protons, so their tally would not include dark matter decays and would therefore suggest neutrons can stick around slightly longer. And that is indeed what the two methods show.

“It would be nice to have an explanation,” says Peter Geltenbort, who runs bottle experiments at the Institut Laue–Langevin in France. If the dark particle idea is correct, “it means that we experimentalists are giving the right error for our measurements. People have written that maybe we are just too optimistic estimating our systematic [uncertainties], but it would confirm that we did a good job.” Geltenbort is also collaborating with Morris on the Los Alamos bottle experiments.

Perhaps the larger implication—if neutron experiments show any evidence for the dark particle hypothesis—is that physicists might then have a link to dark matter. The dark particle that Fornal and Grinstein propose could be the same particle that makes up the cosmos’ missing mass. It could also be a different invisible particle, perhaps part of some larger sector of numerous dark particles. “They [Fornal and Grinstein] are building a very specific set of models to explain the neutron lifetime discrepancy,” says dark matter theorist Peter Graham of Stanford University. “It’s not obvious that their models really fit into any other dark matter models that people have built for other reasons.” For the neutron to decay into a dark particle, for instance, that particle must be lighter than the neutron’s mass of around 940 MeV/c2 (mega–electron volts divided by the speed of light squared). On the other hand, one of the most popular classes of theorized dark matter particles, so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), would weigh somewhere around 100 GeV/c2 (giga–electron volts divided by the speed of light squared)—roughly 100 times more than a neutron.

Fornal first started thinking about the neutron enigma about a year ago. “I ran into an article by Peter Geltenbort about this mysterious discrepancy between the neutron lifetime measurements,” and thought, “wow, that’s a really big thing to explain,” he says. The article was an adaptation of an April 2016 Scientific American story Geltenbort had authored with University of Tennessee Knoxville physicist Geoffrey Greene that was published in the Institut Laue–Langevin’s annual report. Fornal says he was reminded of the topic a few months ago, when he and Grinstein came across a reference to it. “We didn’t find any theoretical model explaining this, and thought it might be an interesting thing to do,” he says. The researchers worked on the hypothesis over the holidays and posted their paper online just after the new year. They are surprised—but thrilled—that they might know soon whether or not neutron decay experiments see evidence for their proposal. “[neutron researchers] started looking for this so quickly,” Fornal says. “It’s nice to hear that this theory is not disconnected from experiments.”

Big Pharma Has the Flu

Flu vaccines make pharma companies $3 billion a year and aren’t very effective. Without a Manhattan Project-style initiative to modernize immunizations, things aren’t going to get any better.




We’ve long known that our flu vaccines aren’t built to last, or to tackle every strain. But pharma companies don’t have an incentive to research drugs that will make them less money—not while current vaccines are good enough to make them $3 billion a year. To drive those new vaccines forward, medicine needs a Manhattan Project-style investment, pulling on resources outside the drug industry to force a new generation of vaccines into existence.















The Next 25 Years of WIRED Start Today

In the first issue of WIRED, published 25 years ago this year, founding editor Louis Rossetto declared that “in the age of information overload, THE ULTIMATE LUXURY IS MEANING AND CONTEXT.” (Caps his.) If anything, that simple observation rings even truer today. That’s why WIRED has always valued depth. We dig deep into our subjects, reveling in wonky engineering details that other publications skip. We think deep thoughts about the future. And we form deep relationships with our audience—connecting them to a community of ideas and encouraging them to think harder about the future they want to inhabit.

For most of our history our business model, primarily built on advertising, rewarded that depth. Advertisers are eager to connect with our sophisticated audience, and WIRED remains the best way to reach them. But in recent years, that industry has proven fickle and tumultuous, and a too-slender reed upon which to hang our entire business.

That’s why today we are launching a paywall—a business that rewards our connection to our audience and will help us keep WIRED a home for unique, surprising, challenging, and sophisticated journalism for the next quarter-century and beyond.

Careful readers may note here that, as the voice of the digital revolution, we have hewed to Stewart Brand’s famous notion that “information wants to be free,” a declaration that some have interpreted to mean that nobody should ever pay for digital content. But read the rest of Brand’s statement: “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable,” he told Steve Wozniak in 1984. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” That tension persists today. Even as information has become cheap or free to distribute, we believe that quality information—built on great reporting, vivid writing, and illuminating insight—remains valuable.

By subscribing to WIRED, you can help us continue our legacy of fresh insights, deep reporting, stunning design, and beautiful writing. The details are here, but in a nutshell: If you read four articles in a month, you will be invited to subscribe to read further. If you subscribe, you not only get unlimited access to and a print subscription, you’ll also receive a free YubiKey—a crucial tool for protecting yourself online. You’ll get access to a digital edition of our magazine, delivered fresh to your tablet every month. And when you visit us online, we’ll take out the ads.

But the real benefit of your subscription is that you’ll ensure that we can continue producing great stories and content. To that end, we want to announce three new programs we’re launching with the paywall. First, we’re happy to introduce the all-new Backchannel—a home for our most ambitious digital long-form journalism. Our long features are routinely the most popular on our site, and that’s why we are building a special home for them—and doubling our investment in producing them.

Next, we’d like to unveil our new Ideas section. WIRED has always prided itself on what we call mind grenades—expansive, surprising ideas that change the way the world thinks. We are now dedicating a section of our website to publishing the biggest ideas from the most exciting thinkers in the world—including MIT MediaLab head Joi Ito, Magic and Loss author Virginia Heffernan, Big Chicken author Maryn McKenna, and Jason Pontin, the former editor of MIT Technology Review.

Finally, we are unleashing an entirely new kind of story—WIRED Guides. These are definitive, authoritative guides to the most important subjects in the WIRED world. Need an update on the state of drone technology? Don’t know the difference between supervised and unsupervised artificial intelligence? Want to finally understand how the blockchain works? WIRED Guides have you covered, with enlightening essays and links to great stories from WIRED’s unparalleled archives.

For a quarter-century, WIRED has watched as the internet has rewritten everything about journalism and media—who creates it, what we expect from it, and how we support it. And yet, at heart, Louis’ central observation in our launch issue is as true today as it was 25 years ago—when mere information is cheap and plentiful, context and meaning are more valuable than ever. The paywall refocuses our business around that simple truth.

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