Astrophysical Probes of Unification

Understand

Traditional ideas for testing unification involve searching for the decay of the proton and its branching modes.

• We point out that several astrophysical experiments are now reaching sensitivities that allow them to explore supersymmetric unified theories.
• In these theories the electroweak-mass DM particle can decay, just like the proton, through dimension six operators with lifetime ~ 10^26 sec.
• Interestingly, this timescale is now being investigated in several experiments including ATIC, PAMELA, HESS, and Fermi.