Talk:Neutron

Neutron was a Natural sciences good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
June 16, 2012	Good article nominee	Not listed

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GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Neutron/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: StringTheory11 (talk · contribs) 04:46, 14 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I will review this article. String Theory¹¹ 04:46, 14 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry, but I will have to quick-fail this article due to a SEVERE lack of sources and bad prose. I feel that I have to downgrade this article to a C, which I have done. String Theory¹¹ 18:01, 17 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

Is it reasonably well written?
A. Prose quality:

B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:
Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
A. References to sources:

B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

C. No original research:
Is it broad in its coverage?
A. Major aspects:

B. Focused:
Is it neutral?
Fair representation without bias:
Is it stable?
No edit wars, etc:
Requesting semi-protection due to vandalism
Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
Overall:
Pass or Fail:

A few preliminary points to work on:

There is a citation needed in the lead. This will need to be fixed.

The references in the "further reading" section are not complete.

Refs 1, 2, 8, 10-13, and 17 need to be more than bare URLs.

Many refs need access dates.

This article has many unreferenced paragraphs. I am of the opinion that every paragraph should have at least one reference before an article is a GA.

I would rename "sources" to "natural sources", and move all artificial source info into "production". Also, the section needs to be expanded.
Many subsections in "intrinsic properties" are too short to comfortably be sections. I believe that if a section only has one paragraph, it is not worthy of a section. Either expand these or merge then with other sections.
"Neutron compounds" should be a subsection of "intrinsic properties".

More to come later. String Theory¹¹ 04:21, 16 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

CPT violation

I would suggest to either remove or rephrase the sentences

The fractional difference in the masses of the neutron and antineutron is (9±6)×10⁻⁵. Since the difference is only about two standard deviations away from zero, this does not give any convincing evidence of CPT-violation.^[1]

The reason is, that I find it somewhat missleading for the non-expert to read this value of (9±6)×10⁻⁵. If one is not familliar with the way of how confidence intervalls are build what a standart deviation is and does not read the lengthy article linked to in the next sentence this gives a wrong impression. It would maybe be helpful to write something like, that this does not show that this value is non-zero and hence does not allow to conclude that CPT symmetry is absent. Regards, Falktan (talk) 20:40, 19 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Interactions

It says one of the interactions is Electromagnetic, but it's neutral and not affected by the electromagnetic force. It's composed of quarks that are, but it's a neutral particle. ScienceApe (talk) 19:44, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think thats ok: The neutron has a magnetic dipole moment and hence interacts with magnetic fields. Regards, Falktan (talk) 12:01, 21 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What does that mean? ScienceApe (talk) 16:44, 21 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It means that each neutron acts like a little magnet. Put it in an inhomogeneous magnetic field (one that has a gradient) and it will experience a force. That's an electromagentic interaction. S B H arris 20:34, 21 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So then by implication it should be possible to collimate neutrons into a beam correct? ScienceApe (talk) 20:28, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In theory, yes. [1] It's been difficult in practice since the magnetic moment is so small. S B H arris 20:33, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Neutron lifetime

The neutron lifetime should be updated as it was lowered by the Particle Data Group to 880.1 ± 1.1 s. see: http://pdg.lbl.gov/2012/listings/rpp2012-list-n.pdf

^ K. Nakamura et al. (Particle Data Group), JP G 37, 075021 (2010) and 2011 partial update for the 2012 edition

[RPP-1] K. Nakamura et al. (Particle Data Group), JP G 37, 075021 (2010) and 2011 partial update for the 2012 edition

[1]