MIT researchers discover “neutronic molecules”

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that neutrons can be made to cling to nanoparticles called quantum dots, which are made up of tens of thousands of atomic nuclei, held there by the strong force. Until this new work, nobody thought that neutrons might actually stick to the materials they were probing. “The fact that [the neutrons] can be trapped by the materials, nobody seems to know about that,” said Ju Li, one of the scientists involved in this study. “We were surprised that this exists.”