Supersymmetric Proton Decay Revisited

Understand

Encouraged by the advent of a new generation of underground detectors---JUNO, DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande---that are projected to improve significantly on the present sensitivities to various baryon decay modes, we revisit baryon decay in the minimal supersymmetric SU(5) GUT.

• We discuss the phenomenological uncertainties associated with hadronic matrix elements and the value of the strong coupling $\alpha_s$---which are the most important---the weak mixing angle $\theta_W$, quark masses including one-loop renormalization effects, quark mixing and novel GUT phases that are not visible in electroweak interaction processes.
• We apply our analysis to a variety of CMSSM, super- and sub-GUT scenarios in which soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters are assumed to be universal at, above and below the GUT scale, respectively.
• In many cases, we find that the next generation of underground detectors should be able to probe models with sparticle masses that are ${\cal O}(10)$~TeV, beyond the reach of the LHC.