Experimental Evidence
The best experimental tests of electric charge conservation are searches for particle decays that would be allowed if electric charge is not always conserved. No such decays have ever been seen. The best experimental test comes from searches for the energetic photon from an electron decaying into a neutrino and a single photon:
| e → νγ | mean lifetime is greater than 4.6 × 1026years (90% Confidence Level), |
but there are theoretical arguments that such single-photon decays will never occur even if charge is not conserved. Charge disappearance tests are sensitive to decays without energetic photons, other unusual charge violating processes such as an electron spontaneously changing into a positron, and to electric charge moving into other dimensions. The best experimental bounds on charge disappearance are:
| e → anything | mean lifetime is greater than 6.4 × 1024years (68% CL) | |
| n → pνν | charge non-conserving decays are less than 8 × 10−27 (68% CL) of all neutron decays |
Read more about this topic: Charge Conservation
Famous quotes containing the words experimental and/or evidence:
“The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is based on induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)