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 2.5 ×10²⁹ y at 90% Bayesian credibility level (with a prior uniform in rate) for the partial lifetime of the neutron, and 3.6 ×10²⁹ y 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 1.3 ×10²⁸ y for n n , 2.6 ×10²⁸ y for p n and 4.7 ×10²⁸ y for p p , an improvement over existing limits by close to 3 orders of magnitude for the latter two.