Improved search for invisible modes of nucleon decay in water with the SNO+ detector

Abstract

This paper reports results from a search for single and multi-nucleon disappearance from the ${}^{16}$O nucleus in water within the \snoplus{} detector using all of the available data. These so-called "invisible" decays do not directly deposit energy within the detector but are instead detected through their subsequent nuclear de-excitation and gamma-ray emission. New limits are given for the partial lifetimes: $\tau (n\to inv)>9.0\times 10^{29}$ years, $\tau (p\to inv)>9.6\times 10^{29}$ years, $\tau (nn\to inv)>1.5\times 10^{28}$ years, $\tau (np\to inv)>6.0\times 10^{28}$ years, and $\tau (pp\to inv)>1.1\times 10^{29}$ years at 90\% Bayesian credibility level (with a prior uniform in rate). All but the ($nn\to inv$) results improve on existing limits by a factor of about 3.

References in corpus (5)

• Search for Proton Decay via $p\to e^{+}{\pi }^0$ and $p\to {\mu }^{+}{\pi }^0$ in 0.31 megaton$\cdot$years exposure of the Super-Kamiokande Water Cherenkov Detector
• The SNO+ Experiment
• Search for nucleon decay into charged antilepton plus meson in 0.316 megaton$\cdot$years exposure of the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov detector
• Measurement of the ${}^8$B Solar Neutrino Flux in SNO+ with Very Low Backgrounds
• Optical calibration of the SNO+ detector in the water phase with deployed sources

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• Dineutron decay into sterile anti-neutrinos in neutron stars and its observable consequences
• Invisible neutron decay and light BSM particles
• TeV Window to Grand Unification: Higgs's Light Color Triplet Partner
• Renormalization-group-improved constraints on dimension-7 baryon-number-violating operators
• Canadian Contributions to the Search for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay