https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921905005
Dark side of the neutron?
Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
a e-mail: bfornal@ucsd.edu
b e-mail: bgrinstein@ucsd.edu
Published online: 12 December 2019
We discuss our recently proposed interpretation of the discrepancy between the bottle and beam neutron lifetime experiments as a sign of a dark sector. The difference between the outcomes of the two types of measurements is explained by the existence of a neutron dark decay channel with a branching fraction 1%. Phenomenologically consistent particle physics models for the neutron dark decay can be constructed and they involve a strongly self-interacting dark sector. We elaborate on the theoretical developments around this idea and describe the efforts undertaken to verify it experimentally.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
