Inclusive Nucleon Decay Searches as a Frontier of Baryon Number Violation

Understand

Proton decay, and the decay of nucleons in general, constitutes one of the most sensitive probes of high-scale physics beyond the Standard Model.

• Most of the existing nucleon decay searches have focused primarily on two-body decay channels, motivated by Grand Unified Theories and supersymmetry.
• However, many higher-dimensional operators violating baryon number by one unit, $\Delta B = 1$, induce multi-body nucleon decay channels, which have been only weakly constrained thus far.
• While direct searches for all such possible channels are desirable, they are highly impractical.