![]() Christian Weinheimer from the University of Münster (Germany) whose group lead the study. “The fact that we managed to observe this process directly demonstrates how powerful our detection method actually is – also for signals which are not from dark matter,” says Prof. This makes the observed radioactive decay, the so-called double electron capture of Xenon-124, the rarest process ever seen happening in a detector. ![]() The half-life measured for Xenon-124 is about one trillion times longer than the age of the universe. The half-life of a process is the time after which half of the radioactive nuclei present in a sample have decayed away. Using our XENON1T detector at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory, we were able to observe the decay of Xenon-124 atomic nuclei for the first time. There are radioactive nuclei that wdecay on much longer time scales. An inconceivable length of time by human standards – yet compared to some physical processes, it is but a moment. The universe is almost 14 billion years old.
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