Researchers have measured a process that takes more than one trillion times the age of the universe to complete, using an instrument built to search for dark matter—the most elusive particle known to man.
In a study published in the journal Nature, the scientists show that the true figure is far higher. In fact, they determined that xenon-124’s half-life is a staggering 18 sextillion years, or 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years—far surpassing the age of the universe at around 13.8 billion years old.
To make their observation, the researchers used an advanced detector known as XENON1T—a 2,900-pound vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cool chamber that's submerged in water around 5,000 feet beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountain. “There have to be enough decays to be measured, and the slower the process the fewer decays there are,” he said. “With such a long time scale, the decays happen extremely rarely, so we get around this by having a huge number of xenon-124 atoms in our detector. Even at that, it took a year's worth of looking to see a very small number of decays."
“Since dark matter collisions and xenon-124 decays are so rare, we have to have the cleanest environment imaginable, so we use ultra-clean materials and operate the detector deep under the mountains to block from cosmic rays and other backgrounds,” he said. “We then monitor this huge volume of xenon for as long as we can to try to see these rare events.”
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