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
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