system
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human
When beryllium-16 decays and produces 2 neutrons simultaneously, what happens to that dineutron?

When beryllium-16 decays and produces 2 neutrons simultaneously, what happens to that dineutron?

What is holding the neutrons together? Gluons? 

Do the neutrons separate and undergo beta decay?
gpt
The dineutron immediately splits apart into two neutrons. The dineutron is an unbound resonance, which decays on a timescale of 10^(-22) seconds.

The neutrons are held together momentarily by the residual strong force. At the lowest level, from QCD, you could say that this force is a result of gluon exchanges between quarks within the separate nucleons. However it’s common in nuclear physics to treat nucleons and mesons as the fundamental degrees of freedom. In these theories, the nucleons interact via exchanges of mesons. 

And to answer the last question, the dineutron splits apart in around 10^(-22) seconds, then the individual neutrons live for **much** longer, since they decay via the weak force rather than the strong force. Neutrons beta decay with a half-life on the order of 10 minutes.