Researchers home in on extremely rare nuclear process

Researchers home in on extremely rare nuclear process: A hypothetical nuclear process known as neutrinoless double beta decay ought to be among the least likely events in the universe. Now the international EXO-200 collaboration, which includes researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has determined just how unlikely it is: In a given volume of a certain xenon isotope, it would take more than 35 trillion trillion years for half of its nuclei to decay through this process—an eternity compared to the age of the universe, which is "only" 13 billion years old.