Electron Decay

TL;DR

This paper explores the hypothetical decay of the electron into a photon and neutrino, proposing a theoretical model involving fundamental particles and strong coupling, and estimates the energy scales at which such decay could reveal substructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theoretical model where the electron, neutrino, and photon are composite particles, and estimates the mass scale at which their substructure might be observable.

Findings

Electron decay lifetime exceeds 2.7 x 10^{23} years.

Lower bound on fundamental particle mass is 10^{22} GeV.

Gauge boson mediating decay has a lower mass bound of 10^9 GeV.

Abstract

The electron would decay into a photon and neutrino if the law of electric charge conservation is not respected. Such a decay would cause vacancy in closed shells of atoms giving rise to emission of x-rays and Auger electrons. Experimental searches for such very rare decay have given an estimate for the life time to be greater than $2.7 \times 10^{23}$ years. The simplest theoretical model which would give rise to such a decay is one where the electron is regarded as the first excited state and neutrino as the ground state of a fundamental spin 1/2 particle bound to a scalar particle by a super strong force and the photon is considered as a bound state of a fundamental spin 1/2 fermion-antifermion pair. The fine structure constant of the super strong coupling is found to be unity from the masslessness of the neutrino and the lower bound of the mass of the fundamental particles is estimated by using quantum mechanical formula for photon emission by atoms and found to be $10^{22}$ GeV from the bound for electron decay time indicating thereby that the composite nature of electron, neutrino and the photon would be revealed in the Planckian energy regime. A model based on extension of $SU(2)\otimes SU(2)$ symmetry of Dirac equation to $SU(3)\otimes SU(3)$ gives a lower bound for the mass of the gauge boson mediating the decay to be $10^9 GeV$ which is the geometric mean of the masses of the electron and the fundamental particles.