Phys. Rev. Lett.
96,
101802
(2006)
[5 pages]
Search for the Invisible Decay of Neutrons with KamLAND
T. Araki et al. KamLAND Collaboration
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T. Araki1, S. Enomoto1, K. Furuno1, Y. Gando1, K. Ichimura1, H. Ikeda1, K. Inoue1, Y. Kishimoto1, M. Koga1, Y. Koseki1, T. Maeda1, T. Mitsui1, M. Motoki1, K. Nakajima1, K. Nakamura1, H. Ogawa1, M. Ogawa1, K. Owada1, J.-S. Ricol1, I. Shimizu1, J. Shirai1, F. Suekane1, A. Suzuki1, K. Tada1, S. Takeuchi1, K. Tamae1, Y. Tsuda1, H. Watanabe1, J. Busenitz2, T. Classen2, Z. Djurcic2, G. Keefer2, D. S. Leonard2, A. Piepke2, E. Yakushev2,*, B. E. Berger3, Y. D. Chan3, M. P. Decowski3, D. A. Dwyer3, S. J. Freedman3, B. K. Fujikawa3, J. Goldman3, F. Gray3, K. M. Heeger3, L. Hsu3, K. T. Lesko3, K.-B. Luk3, H. Murayama3, T. O’Donnell3, A. W. P. Poon3, H. M. Steiner3, L. A. Winslow3, C. Jillings4, C. Mauger4, R. D. McKeown4, P. Vogel4, C. Zhang4, C. E. Lane5, T. Miletic5, G. Guillian6, J. G. Learned6, J. Maricic6, S. Matsuno6, S. Pakvasa6, G. A. Horton-Smith7, S. Dazeley8, S. Hatakeyama8, A. Rojas8, R. Svoboda8, B. D. Dieterle9, J. Detwiler10, G. Gratta10, K. Ishii10, N. Tolich10, Y. Uchida10, M. Batygov11, W. Bugg11, Y. Efremenko11, Y. Kamyshkov11, A. Kozlov11, Y. Nakamura11, H. J. Karwowski12, D. M. Markoff12, R. M. Rohm12, W. Tornow12, R. Wendell12, M.-J. Chen13, Y.-F. Wang13, and F. Piquemal14 (KamLAND Collaboration)
1Research Center for Neutrino Science, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8578, Japan
2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487, USA
3Physics Department, University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
4W. K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
5Physics Department, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
6Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA
7Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506, USA
8Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA
9Physics Department, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131, USA
10Physics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
11Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, USA
12Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA and Physics Departments at Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
13Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing 100039, People’s Republic of China
14CEN Bordeaux-Gradignan, IN2P3-CNRS and University Bordeaux I, F-33175 Gradignan Cedex, France
Received 23 December 2005; published 17 March 2006
The Kamioka Liquid scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector is used in a search for single neutron or two-neutron intranuclear disappearance that would produce holes in the s-shell energy level of 12C nuclei. Such holes could be created as a result of nucleon decay into invisible modes (inv), e.g., n→3ν or nn→2ν. The deexcitation of the corresponding daughter nucleus results in a sequence of space and time-correlated events observable in the liquid scintillator detector. We report on new limits for one- and two-neutron disappearance: τ(n→inv)>5.8×1029 years and τ(nn→inv)>1.4×1030 years at 90% C.L. These results represent an improvement of factors of ∼3 and >104 over previous experiments.
© 2006 The American Physical Society
URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.101802
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.101802
PACS:
13.30.Ce, 11.30.Fs, 14.20.Dh, 29.40.Mc
*Present address: DLNP, JINR, Dubna, Russia.
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