Physicists Hope to Catch Neutrons in the Act of Jumping from Our Universe to ...
01.01.70
In a perfect experiment, the neutrons would always decay precisely at a rate equal to the beta decay rate, but this is never the case because neutron bottles aren’t perfect--the rate of decay is always a bit faster, presumably because some of the neutrons escape by means other than decay.
Or maybe they don’t. Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few colleagues have postulated that maybe these neutrons simply depart for another universe. They have already shown how, theoretically, large enough magnetic potentials could provide the basis for inter-universe matter swapping. Now, in a paper available at arXiv , they’ve used decay rate data to place an upper limit on how often this might be able to happen. They found that it’s probably quite rare if it happens at all--according to their figures, the probability of a neutron making the leap to another universe is smaller than one in a million.
But that doesn’t rule it out completely, especially considering how many neutrons there are out there. Moreover, Sarrazin thinks he has a way to observe this experimentally. A change in the gravitational potential should also affect the rate of matter swapping, and the gravitational potential her on Earth changes as the planet moves around the Sun. Run a neutron trapping experiment for a full year, and you could see if there is a modulation in the rate of neutron decay based on some kind of annual cycle. If so, that means the neutrons probably aren’t just decaying, but swapping universes as well.
Source: Popular Science
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