Neutron and proton are intercovertible its half life is 20 mts
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Neutron and protons are made up of elementary particles called as quarks.
The decay of the neutron is associated with a quark transformation in which a down quark is converted to an up by the weak interaction. The average lifetime of 10.3 min/0.693 = 14.9 minutes is surprisingly long for a particle decay that yields 1.29 MeV of energy. You could say that this decay is steeply "downhill" in energy and would be expected to proceed rapidly. It is possible for a proton to be transformed into a neutron, but you have to supply 1.29 MeV of energy to reach the threshold for that transformation. In the very early stages of the big bang when the thermal energy was much greater than 1.29 MeV, we surmise that the transformation between protons and neutrons was proceeding freely in both directions so that there was an essentially equal population of protons and neutrons.