Research report 2019 - Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics
A breath of eternity: The slowest nuclear transition ever observed
Authors
Simgen, Hardy; Marrodán Undagoitia, Teresa; Lindner, Manfred
Departments
Abteilung Teilchen- und Astroteilchenphysik
Summary
Is there anything older than our Universe? Surely not, but billions of years appear as a blink of an eye compared to some extremely slow processes. Physicists of the XENON1T collaboration detected such a process. It is the radioactive decay of the xenon-124 atomic nucleus, the slowest decay process ever measured. The half-life of this extremely rare nuclear transformation is for unimaginably long 1.8 × 1022 years. This corresponds to about a trillion times the age of the Universe!