LIMITS ON CHARGE NON-CONSERVATION FROM POSSIBLE SEASONAL VARIATIONS OF THE SOLAR NEUTRINO EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Variable speed of light (VSL) theories may lead to large violations of charge conservation that can be written in terms of a dimensionless parameter λ. Similarly, charge non-conservation can arise in theories that break down Einstein's Equivalence Principle, parametrized in terms of Γ0. It is shown that for such theories, the motion of the Earth with respect to the Sun would produce a seasonal variation for the SAGE and GALLEX–GNO experiments. Analyzing the reported counting rates for these experiments, a very stringent bound |λ|≤2×10-19 is obtained, some 109 times smaller than previous ones. For the second example, the corresponding bound is |Γ0|<10-18, which represents an improvement of 107 on the previous result. Furthermore, assuming that the previous conditions apply, the existing bound for the lifetime of the 71 Ga →71 Ge charge-nonconserving decay is improved as: τ CNC ≥1.4×1027 years. Similarly a new upper limit for the ratio of the charge-nonconserving to the normal weak decay of the neutron is obtained: [Formula: see text].