Limits on charge non-conservation from possible seasonal variations of the solar neutrino experiments

Abstract

Variable speed of light (VSL) theories generically lead to large violations of charge conservation that can be written in terms of a dimensionless parameter $\lambda$. It is shown that the motion of the Earth with respect to the Sun could lead to a seasonal variation for the SAGE and GALLEX-GNO experiments and analyzing the reported counting rates for these experiments, a very stringent bound $\lambda \le 2\times 10^{-19}$ is obtained, some $10^9$ times smaller than previous ones. Furthermore, a bound on the lifetime of the $\null^{71}{\rm Ga} \to \null^{71} {\rm Ge}$ charge-nonconserving decay in VSL theories is found as: ${\tau }_{\mathrm{CNC}}\ge 1.4\times 10^{27}\mathrm{years}$. Similarly a new upper limit for the ratio of the charge-nonconserving to the normal weak decay of the neutron in VSL theories is obtained: $\Gamma (n\to p+{\nu }_e+{\bar{\nu }}_e)/\Gamma (n\to p+e+{\bar{\nu }}_e)\le 2\times 10^{-27}$.

6 pages, LaTeX + .bbl files

References in corpus (5)

• Further Evidence for Cosmological Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant
• Measurement of the Solar Neutrino Capture Rate by the Russian-American Gallium Solar Neutrino Experiment During One Half of the 22-Year Cycle of Solar Activity
• A Simple Varying-alpha Cosmology
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Photon mass and electrogenesis