Test of electric charge conservation in dark matter direct detection experiment

Abstract

Electric charge conservation (ECC) is typically taken as an axiom in the standard model. Searching for small violations with high-performance experiments could lead us to new physics. In this work, we tested ``invisible" electric charge nonconservation (ECNC) events with 1.16 ton$\cdot$year electron recoil data from the XENON-nT experiment. There was no statistically significant signal, and the ECNC limit was updated to $τ(e^-\rightarrow{ν_e+\barν_e+ν_e}) > 4.34 \times10^{27}$ yr. This work increases the limit by two orders of magnitude and shows that dark matter direct detection experiments have great potential for further ECC testing.