Eur. Phys. J. C (2016) 76: 619
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

Abstract

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.