Search for Pauli Exclusion Principle Violating Atomic Transitions and Electron Decay with a P-type Point Contact Germanium Detector

Abstract

A search for Pauli-exclusion-principle-violating K-alpha electron transitions was performed using 89.5 kg-d of data collected with a p-type point contact high-purity germanium detector operated at the Kimballton Underground Research Facility. A lower limit on the transition lifetime of 5.8x10^30 seconds at 90% C.L. was set by looking for a peak at 10.6 keV resulting from the x-ray and Auger electrons present following the transition. A similar analysis was done to look for the decay of atomic K-shell electrons into neutrinos, resulting in a lower limit of 6.8x10^30 seconds at 90 C.L. It is estimated that the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, a 44 kg array of p-type point contact detectors that will search for the neutrinoless double-beta decay of 76-Ge, could improve upon these exclusion limits by an order of magnitude after three years of operation.

References in corpus (3)

• Limits and Confidence Intervals in the Presence of Nuisance Parameters
• An Improved Limit on Pauli-Exclusion-Principle Forbidden Atomic Transitions
• Theories of violation of statistics

Cited by in corpus (8)

• New limits on Bosonic Dark Matter, Solar Axions, Pauli Exclusion Principle Violation, and Electron Decay from the Majorana Demonstrator
• Testing Noncommutative Spacetimes and Violations of the Pauli Exclusion Principle with underground experiments
• Ge Detectors and $0\nu \beta \beta$: The Search for Double Beta Decay with Germanium Detectors: Past, Present and Future
• Strongest atomic physics bounds on Non-Commutative Quantum Gravity Models
• Experimental test of Non-Commutative Quantum Gravity by VIP-2 Lead
• Performance of a convolutional autoencoder designed to remove electronic noise from p-type point contact germanium detector signals
• Experimental study of 13C(α,n)16O reactions in the Majorana Demonstrator calibration data
• VIP-2 at LNGS: An experiment on the validity of the Pauli Exclusion Principle for electrons