Related papers: How long does the hydrogen atom live?
The 21cm line refers to a forbidden transition in neutral hydrogen associated with alignment of spins of the proton and electron. It is a very low energy transition that is emitted whenever there is neutral hydrogen in the Universe. Since…
When a muon bound in an atom decays, there is a small probability that the daughter electron remains bound. That probability is evaluated. Surprisingly, a significant part of the rate is contributed by the negative energy component of the…
For neutrons bound inside nuclei, baryon instability can manifest itself as a decay into undetectable particles (e.g., $\it n \to \nu \nu \bar{\nu} $), i.e., as a disappearance of a neutron from its nuclear state. If electric charge is…
Water is necessary both for the evolution of life and its continuance. It possesses particular properties that cannot be found in other materials and that are required for life-giving processes. These properties are brought about by the…
The radiative ortho-para transition in the molecular hydrogen is studied. This highly forbidden transition is very sensitive to relativistic and subtle nonadiabatic effects. Our result for the transition rate in the ground vibrational level…
To constrain the allowed range for the axion decay constant $f_{a}$ or, equivalently, for the axion mass $m_{a}$, we consider the cooling of a neutron star with strong proton superfluidity and normal (non-superfluid) neutrons inside its…
The kinematics of the decay of a bound proton is governed by the proton spectral function. We evaluate this quantity in 16O using the information from nuclear physics experiments. It also includes a correlated part. The reliability of this…
There has been much recent interest in long-lived massive particles at the LHC, understood as those with lifetimes between tens of micrometers and several meters. In this context we consider the possibility of long-lived electroweak singlet…
We show that the process of photoionizing a gas of atomic hydrogen and helium by line radiation whose energy is slightly above the helium single-ionization threshold is unstable if the helium fraction by number is less than approximately…
Recently, the charge radius of the proton was extracted for the first time from muonic hydrogen. The value obtained is five standard deviations away from similar measurements of regular hydrogen. This talk discusses work done in…
Time-resolved x-ray absorption spectroscopy monitors the transient species generated by one-photon detachment of an electron from aqueous bromide. Hydrated bromine atoms with a lifetime of ca. 17 ns were observed, nearly half of which react…
Spontaneous fission and alpha decay are the main decay modes for superheavy nuclei. The superheavy nuclei which have small alpha decay half-life compared to spontaneous fission half-life will survive fission and can be detected in the…
The neutron lifetime anomaly has been used to motivate the introduction of new physics with hidden-sector particles coupled to baryon number, and on which neutron stars provide powerful constraints. Although the neutron lifetime anomaly may…
Experimental studies of neutron decay, $n\to pe\bar\nu$, exhibit two anomalies. The first is a 8.6(2.1)s, roughly $4\sigma$ difference between the average beam measured neutron lifetime, $\tau_n^\text{beam}=888.0(2.0)$s, and the more…
It is shown that, Baire generically, the bound states of the Hamiltonian of the Hydrogen atom have spectral measures with exact $0$-lower and $1/3$-upper generalized fractal dimensions; the relation to (a weak form of) dynamical…
We propose that supernova relic neutrino (SRN) observation can be used to set constraints on the neutrino decay models. Because of the long distance scale from cosmological supernovae to the Earth, SRN have possibility to provide much…
We explore, mostly using data from solar neutrino experiments, the hypothesis that the neutrino mass eigenstates are unstable. We find that, by combining $^8$B solar neutrino data with those on $^7$Be and lower-energy solar neutrinos, one…
To date the magnetic radius of the proton has been determined only by means of electron-proton scattering, which is not free of controversies. Any existing atomic determinations are irrelevant because they are strongly model-dependent. We…
Contrary to a common argument that a small increase in the strength of the strong force would lead to destruction of all hydrogen in the big bang due to binding of the diproton and the dineutron with a catastrophic impact on life as we know…
We present novel effects of uniform rapid stellar rotation on the minimum mass of stable hydrogen burning in very low mass stars, using an analytic model, and relaxing the assumption of spherical symmetry. We obtain an analytic formula for…