Particle Interactions with Matter and Mechanisms of Soft Errors in Semiconductor Circuits

The neutron was discovered in 1932 by Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974), a British physicist (Cambridge), who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for this fundamental discovery in the domain of particle physics. The neutron is an uncharged elementary particle, with a mass (1.67493 × 10−27 kg) slightly larger than that of the proton (1.67262 × 10−27 kg). It is also unstable as a free particle; it disintegrates into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino with a lifetime of 886.7 s.