Eur. Phys. J. C (2020) 80: 332
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-7872-3

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Supersymmetric proton decay revisited

¹ Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology Group, Department of Physics, King’s College London, London, WC2R 2LS, UK
² Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
³ National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, Rävala 10, 10143, Tallinn, Estonia
⁴ School of Physics, KIAS, Seoul, 130-722, Korea
⁵ T. D. Lee Institute, Shanghai, 200240, China
⁶ Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
⁷ William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA
⁸ Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, PO Box 7803, 5020, Bergen, Norway

^* e-mail: jlevans@sjtu.edu.cn

Received: 2 January 2020
Accepted: 5 March 2020
Published online: 21 April 2020

Abstract

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 – which are the most important – the weak mixing angle , 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  TeV, beyond the reach of the LHC.