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Search for invisible modes of nucleon decay in water with the SNO+ detector
This paper reports results from a search for nucleon decay through invisible modes, where no visible energy is directly deposited during the decay itself, during the initial water phase of SNO+. However, such decays within the oxygen nucleus would produce an excited daughter that would subsequently deexcite, often emitting detectable gamma rays. A search for such gamma rays yields limits of 2.5Γ1029ββy at 90% Bayesian credibility level (with a prior uniform in rate) for the partial lifetime of the neutron, and 3.6Γ1029ββy for the partial lifetime of the proton, the latter a 70% improvement on the previous limit from SNO. We also present partial lifetime limits for invisible dinucleon modes of 1.3Γ1028ββy for nn, 2.6Γ1028ββy for pn and 4.7Γ1028ββy for pp, an improvement over existing limits by close to 3 orders of magnitude for the latter two