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Yes. We can (and do) smash protons. We can slam them into each other or we can slam protons into antiprotons. Big accelerators do this kind of work. The protons will break up, but the things that we get vary as the type of collisions (and the energies) involved in the smashing project. A proton is composed of two up quarks and a down quark, and a neutron is composed of two down quarks and an up quark. The neutron is unstable outside of a nucleus. It has a half-life of a bit under 886 seconds. That's about 14.8 minutes, roughly. When a free neutron decays, it decays into a proton, an electron and an electron antineutrino.

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17y ago

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