The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.
At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.
View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.
Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started July, 2011. These files are currently not publicly accessible.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110718005340/http://hep.bu.edu/~superk/pdk.html
Proton Decay
The Standard Model of particle physics has been extremely succesful
in describing the fundamental constituents of matter. Practically every
prediction based on this model has been confirmed experimentally. Despite
this success, some questions remain unanswered. Why are the charges of quarks
quantized in units of one third the charge of the electron? Why does the
standard model require 4 parameters (three coupling constants and one
weak mixing angle) to describe
the strong and electroweak forces (3 of the 4 fundamental forces)?
Grand unification theories (GUTs) provide answers to these questions.
By providing a link between quarks and leptons the charge question is
answered. By postulating that the fundamental forces are simply a low
energy manifestation of a single grand unified force the "coupling constant"
question is answered. The coupling constants that describe these forces
appear to meet
at a single point at some large energy scale inaccessible by
particle accelerators (which currently can access energies of about 1 TeV, or
about 10 times the mass of the Z boson), called the grand unification
scale.
If grand unification occurs, quarks could transform into leptons by exchanging
an extremely heavy particle (weighing 15 orders of magnitude more than
the proton itself). Because protons are composed of three quarks this
transformation would allow
them to decay, something that is not predicted by the Standard Model.
Observation of proton decay would be indirect evidence for these heavy
particles and new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Because the exchanged particle is so heavy, the proton lifetime
predicted by grand unification models is extremely long... about 20 orders of
magnitude longer than the age of the universe!
The most basic GUT predicts the dominant proton decay mode to be
p->e^+ pi0. The Super-Kamiokande detector has excellent capibility to
observe this decay mode.
By using water as the source of protons, a proton from either hydrogen or
oxygen would decay into a positron and a pi0.
The positron produces an electromagnetic shower which is balanced by two
electromagnetic showers from the instantaneous decay of the pi0
(pi0 -> gamma gamma).
These electromagnetic showers can be seen in Super-Kamiokande. A
Monte Carlo event is shown below (this is not real data but a detector
simulation.)
No events have been observed and a limit on the lifetime has
been set to be over 10^(33) years. From this, the most basic GUT has been
ruled out. Other GUTs predict longer lifetimes which are within the
sensitivity of Super-Kamiokande. The search for proton decay will continue
at Super-Kamiokande to either confirm one of these theories or to
set stringent limits on them... the most stringent in the world.