Speaker
Description
The discrepancies in measurements of the lifetime of the neutrons could be resolved considering an extra neutron decay channel into dark matter, with a branching ratio of the order of O(1%). Although the decay channel into a dark fermion $\chi$ plus visible matter has been already experimentally excluded, a dark decay into a dark matter fermion plus either a scalar or dark photon remains still a possibility. In particular, a model with a fermion mass $m_\chi\approx 1$ GeV and a scalar $m_\phi \approx 1-2$ MeV could provide not only the required branching ratio to explain the anomaly but also a good dark matter candidate with the right thermal abundance today, and being consistent with neutron stars physics.