Question

Can neutrons jump between universes?

A few years ago, physicists showed that it might be theoretically possible for neutrons to make the leap from our universe to a different one if the gravitational potential of an entire galaxy were involved. Lucky for us, we happen to live in a galaxy so if we look closely enough, it should be possible to spot these neutrons jumping out of our galaxy.
By watching a bunch of neutrons all at once, we might be able to experimentally verify whether any of them are disappearing off to alternate universes.

How Neutrons Might Escape Into Another Universe:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27517/


Attached is the full text for the publication:
Experimental limits on neutron disappearance into another braneworld.
Michael Sarrazin, Guillaume Pignol, Fabrice Petit, Valery V. Nesvizhevsky

"Recent theoretical works have shown that matter swapping between two parallel braneworlds could occur under the influence of magnetic vector potentials. In our visible world, galactic magnetism possibly produces a huge magnetic potential. As a consequence, this paper discusses the possibility to observe neutron disappearance into another braneworld in certain circumstances. The setup under consideration involves stored ultracold neutrons - in a vessel - which should exhibit a non zero probability p to disappear into an invisible brane at each wall collision. An upper limit of p is assessed based on available experimental results. This value is then used to constrain the parameters of the theoretical model. Possible improvements of the experiments are discussed."


Thoughts?

Topics

4 / 1  ·  11 Answers  ·  158 Views

All Answers (11)

  • Michael Shaughnessy · Sandia National Laboratories
    It would be pretty interesting if true
  • neutrons jumping is a pretty new concept .May be it could be the anti neutron that could show behaviour like this .
  • Philip Metzger · ResearchGate
    Could be any if the multi verse theory is correct.
  • Susana Curatolo · CZT Inc.
    Yes, mathematically through A4 projections,
  • Francisco Mariano Neto · University of São Paulo
    So we are talking science fiction in this forum too?
  • Howard Van Woert · Sungkyunkwan University
    I think you may be right on this one. I shall be looking for those peer reviewed papers and learned seminars to prove us wrong Neto. Would you call Dark Matter science fiction? Black Holes?
  • Gustavo Valdiviesso · Universidade Federal de Alfenas
    "In theory" means everything. At some moment in time, there always is as many theories that explain what we see as theories that predict unseen things. Actually, there might be even more. So with enough time, less than half of them will be right. But I ask you all to contribute positively to the discussions because calling every new possibility "science fiction" is as easy as it would be for your grand father, in your age, to say that "a device that has computing power, can take pictures, can communicate digitally with anyone in the world AND is also a phone" is science fiction. Moreover, criticizing without reading the reference is easy. Actually, I dare to say it is "lazy work". For instance, on section III.A of the cited paper, neutron decays are taken in account when calculating the probability for the neutron to swap between branes. So I ask you a little more politeness when inferring about the quality of the "so called scientist" of today.

    I read the paper and there is nothing wrong with it. It is, indeed, an interesting possibility, although we would have to extend the concept of energy conservation to multi-branes since our own brane would be losing mass. But, if we think about the two branes as equivalents, so in some point of our space we are acquiring some neutrons as well. So, in a global and statistical way, conservation of energy would still be holding on.
  • Anu Gupta · University of Jammu
    about 10^14 neutrinos cross our body per second. But they do not interact with anything. this means showers of neutrino are passed through the space around us.

Question Followers (14) See all