Search for the Invisible Decay of Neutrons with KamLAND

Creators: Araki, T.; Jillings, C.; Mauger, C.; McKeown, R. D.; Vogel, P.; Zhang, C.; KamLAND Collaboration

Abstract

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 ^(12)C 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 × 10^(29) years and τ(nn→inv) > 1.4 × 10^(30) years at 90% C.L. These results represent an improvement of factors of ~3 and > 10^4 over previous experiments.

Additional Information

© 2006 American Physical Society. Received 23 December 2005; published 17 March 2006. The KamLAND experiment is supported by the COE program under Grant No. 09CE2003 of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, and under the United States Department of Energy Grant No. DEFG03-00ER41138. We are grateful to the Kamioka Mining and Smelting Company that provided service for activities in the mine. We are also grateful to Scott Outten (University of Tennessee) for providing SCINFUL simulations.

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