Relation between proton decay and PMNS phase in the minimal SUSY SO(10) GUT

Abstract

Proton decay is one of the most important predictions of the grand unified theory (GUT). In the supersymmetric (SUSY) GUT, proton decays via the dimension-five operators need to be suppressed. In the SO(10) model where 10+126‾ Higgs fields couple to fermions, neutrino oscillation parameters including the CP-violating Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata (PMNS) phase can be related to the Yukawa couplings to generate the dimension-five operators in the unified framework. We show how the suppressed proton decay depends on the PMNS phase, and stress the importance of the precise measurements of the PMNS phase as well as the neutrino 23-mixing angle. These become especially important if the SUSY particles are found around less than a few TeV at LHC and proton decays are observed at Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE experiments in the near future.