Dark Side of the Neutron?

Understand

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.