Search for proton decay via p →μ+K0 in 0.37 megaton-years exposure of Super-Kamiokande

Abstract

© 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.We searched for proton decay via p→μ+K0 in 0.37 Mton·years of data collected between 1996 and 2018 from the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov experiment. The selection criteria were defined separately for KS0 and KL0 channels. No significant event excess has been observed. As a result of this analysis, which extends the previous search by an additional 0.2 Mton·years of exposure and uses an improved event reconstruction, we set a lower limit of 3.6×1033 years on the proton lifetime.