https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4467-0
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Search for Pauli exclusion principle violating atomic transitions and electron decay with a p-type point contact germanium detector
1
Department of Physics, Black Hills State University, Spearfish, SD, USA
2
Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
3
National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia
4
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
5
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
6
Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
7
Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
8
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
9
Research Center for Nuclear Physics, Osaka University, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan
10
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
11
Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
12
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, USA
13
Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, Durham, NC, USA
14
Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, TN, USA
15
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
16
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
17
Department of Physics, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA
18
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
19
Department of Physics, Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
20
Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
* e-mail: gkg@princeton.edu
Received:
22
August
2016
Accepted:
3
November
2016
Published online:
11
November
2016
A search for Pauli-exclusion-principle-violating K 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
s 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
s 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
Ge, could improve upon these exclusion limits by an order of magnitude after three years of operation.
© The Author(s), 2016