The Tetraneutron — the stance that could not be taken

This paper set out to put a standing stance on the record: does the ledger say four neutrons can bind? In 2022 an experiment at RIKEN reported a contested four-neutron resonance (Duer et al., Nature 606, 678), while decades of theory say no bound tetraneutron exists. A dated yes/no from the packing, filed before the dust settles, would have been the cheapest falsifiable claim on the 80/20 list. The runner caught its own premise instead. At the ledger's two faces contradict each other: The four-coefficient core gets the right sign for all three. Add the squeeze term and every pure-neutron system flips to deeply bound — a dineutron bound by 91 MeV, nonsense on its face. The reason is pure extrapolation: the squeeze coefficient (~170 MeV) was fitted on a table whose lopsidedness never exceeds 0.667 (H-6); a pure-neutron system sits at 1.000, fifty percent beyond the most lopsided nuclide the term ever saw. A term evaluated outside its fitted domain is noise wearing the fit's clothes. This record holds one paper on its own and is refreshed every couple of months. The complete deposit, 10.5281/zenodo.21788037, holds every paper with its code and data and is updated first; for the newest version of this paper, go there.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-11-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23848224
Primary Topic
Nuclear physics research studies
Type
preprint
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The Tetraneutron — the stance that could not be taken

James Norman Ibbotson
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Nuclear physics research studies
preprint

The Tetraneutron — the stance that could not be taken

James Norman Ibbotson
preprint en

Abstract

This paper set out to put a standing stance on the record: does the ledger say four neutrons can bind? In 2022 an experiment at RIKEN reported a contested four-neutron resonance (Duer et al., Nature 606, 678), while decades of theory say no bound tetraneutron exists. A dated yes/no from the packing, filed before the dust settles, would have been the cheapest falsifiable claim on the 80/20 list. The runner caught its own premise instead. At the ledger's two faces contradict each other: The four-coefficient core gets the right sign for all three. Add the squeeze term and every pure-neutron system flips to deeply bound — a dineutron bound by 91 MeV, nonsense on its face. The reason is pure extrapolation: the squeeze coefficient (~170 MeV) was fitted on a table whose lopsidedness never exceeds 0.667 (H-6); a pure-neutron system sits at 1.000, fifty percent beyond the most lopsided nuclide the term ever saw. A term evaluated outside its fitted domain is noise wearing the fit's clothes. This record holds one paper on its own and is refreshed every couple of months. The complete deposit, 10.5281/zenodo.21788037, holds every paper with its code and data and is updated first; for the newest version of this paper, go there.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Nuclear physics research studies
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