Journal of High Energy Physics (Jul 2024)

Baryon number violation involving tau leptons

  • Julian Heeck,
  • Dima Watkins

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)170
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2024, no. 7
pp. 1 – 16

Abstract

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Abstract Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, especially through the study of nucleon decays. Angular momentum conservation requires a lepton in the final state of such decays, kinematically restricted to electrons, muons, or neutrinos. We show that operators involving taus, which are at first sight too heavy to play a role in nucleon decays, still lead to clean nucleon decay channels with tau neutrinos. While many of them are already constrained from existing two-body searches such as p → π + ν, other operators induce many-body decays such as p → ηπ + ν ¯ τ $$ p\to {\eta \pi}^{+}{\overline{\nu}}_{\tau } $$ and n → K + π − ν τ that have never been searched for.

Keywords