1205.6538 (The Super-Kamiokande Collaboration: C. Regis et al.)

Search for Proton Decay into Muon plus Neutral Kaon in Super-Kamiokande
I, II, and III    [PDF]

The Super-Kamiokande Collaboration: C. Regis, K. Abe, Y. Hayato, K. Iyogi, J. Kameda, Y. Koshio, Ll. Marti, M. Miura, S. Moriyama, M. Nakahata, S. Nakayama, Y. Obayashi, H. Sekiya, M. Shiozawa, Y. Suzuki, A. Takeda, Y. Takenaga, K. Ueno, T. Yokozawa, H. Kaji, T. Kajita, K. Kaneyuki, K. P. Lee, K. Okumura, T. McLachlan, L. Labarga, E. Kearns, J. L. Raaf, J. L. Stone, L. R. Sulak, M. Goldhaber, K. Bays, G. Carminati, W. R. Kropp, S. Mine, A. Renshaw, M. B. Smy, H. W. Sobel, K. S. Ganezer, J. Hill, W. E. Keig, J. S. Jang, J. Y. Kim, I. T. Lim, J. B. Albert, K. Scholberg, C. W. Walter, R. A. Wendell, T. Wongjirad, T. Ishizuka, S. Tasaka, J. G. Learned, S. Matsuno, S. N. Smith, T. Hasegawa, T. Ishida, T. Ishii, T. Kobayashi, T. Nakadaira, K. Nakamura, K. Nishikawa, Y. Oyama, K. Sakashita, T. Sekiguchi, T. Tsukamoto, A. T. Suzuki, Y. Takeuchi, K. Ieki, M. Ikeda, H. Kubo, A. Minamino, A. Murakami, T. Nakaya, Y. Fukuda, K. Choi, Y. Itow, G. Mitsuka, M. Miyake, P. Mijakowski, J. Hignight, J. Imber, C. K. Jung, I. Taylor, C. Yanagisawa, H. Ishino, A. Kibayashi, T. Mori, M. Sakuda, J. Takeuchi, Y. Kuno, S. B. Kim, H. Okazawa, Y. Choi, K. Nishijima, M. Koshiba, Y. Totsuka, M. Yokoyama, K. Martens, M. R. Vagins, S. Chen, H. Sui, Z. Yang, H. Zhang, K. Connolly, M. Dziomba, R. J. Wilkes

We have searched for proton into muon plus neutral kaon using data from a 91.7 kiloton-year exposure of Super-Kamiokande-I, a 49.2 kiloton-year exposure of Super-Kamiokande-II, and a 31.9 kiloton-year exposure of Super-Kamiokande-III. The number of candidate events in the data was consistent with the atmospheric neutrino background expectation and no evidence for proton decay in this mode was found. We set a partial lifetime lower limit of 1.6x10^33 years at the 90% confidence level.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6538