A Novel Scheme to Search for Fractional Charge Particles in Low Energy Accelerator Experiments

Abstract

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the quarks and anti-quarks have fractional charge equal to $\pm 1/3$ or $\pm 2/3$ of the electron's charge. There has been a large number of experiments searching for fractional charge, isolatable, elementary particles using a variety of methods, including $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collisions using dE/dx ionization energy loss measurements, but no evidence has been found to confirm existence of free fractional charge particles, which leads to the quark confinement theory. In this paper, a proposal to search for this kind particles is presented, which is based on the conservation law of four-momentum. Thanks to the CLEOc and BESIII detectors' large coverage, good particle identification, precision measurements of tracks' momenta and their large recorded data samples, these features make the scheme feasible in practice. The advantage of the scheme is independent of any theoretical models and sensitive for a small fraction of the quarks transitioning to the unconfinement phase from the confinement phase.

9 pages

References in corpus (11)

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