Proton Decay and Flavor Violating Thresholds in SO(10) Models

Understand

Discovery of neutrino mass has put the spotlight on supersymmetric SO(10) as a natural candidate for grand unification of forces and matter.

• However, the suppression of proton decay is a major problem in any supersymmetric grand unified models.
• In this paper we show how to alleviate this problem by simple threshold effect which raises the colored Higgsino masses and the grand unification scale to \gtrsim 10^{17} GeV.
• There exist only four types of fields arising from different SO(10) representations which can generate this kind of threshold effects.