According to the Standard Model, protons are stable because baryon number is conserved (chiral anomaly for exception). Therefore, protons will not decay into other particles on their own, because they are the lightest baryon. It has long been considered to be a stable particle, but recent developments of grand unification models have suggested that it might decay with a half-life of about 10^30 - 10^35 years. Currently the most precise results come from the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov radiation detector in Japan: a 2015 analysis placed a lower bound on the proton's half-life of 1.67×10^34 years.

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