In a random maze

by Greg Kotkowski

One of the best things about being a parent is that as an adult you can play with kids’ toys and nobody judges it as strange (men never grow up). As my kids are still very young, so far I’ve had possibilities to play with dolls (not my favourite), car toys (great memories come back), soap bubbles and other simple toys.

Is Dark Matter Lurking in Neutron Decays?

by Tommaso Dorigo

A paper by B. Fornal and B. Grinstein published last week in Physical Review Letters is drawing a lot of interest to one of the most well-known pieces of subnuclear physics since the days of Enrico Fermi: beta decay.

The mechanism by means of which a neutron transmutes into a proton has been studied for decades before the neutron was officially discovered (by Chadwick, in 1932). That is because beta decay is at the heart of radioactive processes: nuclei of elements rich with neutrons can turn into others by turning one of their neutrons into a proton, with the emission of an electron and an antineutrino. The details of that reaction were understood thanks to Fermi and a handful of other