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Following links to related articles gets to an earlier https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/186 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/186 (talking about the weir
by eichin 3y ago
Following links to related articles gets to an earlier https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/186 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/186 (talking about the weird decay rather than the Nitrogen itself) which quotes the whole multiproton decay process taking 10*-21 seconds but I don't see anything specifically about 9N having a half-life; is that just not yet determined, or is it implied somehow? (I have an at-most-casual interest in the field so I haven't hunted down the paper itself, but even I can tell this is way over on a weird edge of things :-)
- pvg 3y agoThe arxiv version of the paper says: the decay widths of the low-lying states increase, eventually melting into an unresolvable continuum as their lifetimes become commensurate with typical reaction and single-particle timescales. Here, the very notion of the nuclear state becomes questionable as the timescales are too short to talk about the existence of a nucleus. Indeed as dis- cussed in Ref. [9], if a collection of nucleons survives for less than about 10−22 s, it should not be considered a nucleus. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15180 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15180