A Novel Scheme to Search for Fractional Charge Particles in Low Energy Accelerator Experiments

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new experimental scheme to search for free fractional charge particles using conservation of four-momentum in low energy accelerator experiments, leveraging existing detector capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent method to detect fractional charge particles, utilizing the large coverage and precise measurements of current detectors like CLEOc and BESIII.

Findings

Feasible detection scheme based on four-momentum conservation.

Sensitive to small fractions of quarks transitioning to unconfinement.

Independent of theoretical models for fractional charge detection.

Abstract

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the quarks and anti-quarks have fractional charge equal to $\pm1/3$ or $\pm2/3$ of the electron's charge. There has been a large number of experiments searching for fractional charge, isolatable, elementary particles using a variety of methods, including $e^+e^-$ collisions using dE/dx ionization energy loss measurements, but no evidence has been found to confirm existence of free fractional charge particles, which leads to the quark confinement theory. In this paper, a proposal to search for this kind particles is presented, which is based on the conservation law of four-momentum. Thanks to the CLEOc and BESIII detectors' large coverage, good particle identification, precision measurements of tracks' momenta and their large recorded data samples, these features make the scheme feasible in practice. The advantage of the scheme is independent of any theoretical models and sensitive for a small fraction of the quarks transitioning to the unconfinement phase from the confinement phase.