DUSEL R&D: Testing Theories of Proton Stability and Unification at DUSEL

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) will explore new physics at extremely short distances not accessible to accelerator experiments. Specifically, the proposed proton stability experiments at DUSEL, along with a new generation of experiments at HyperK, MEMPHYS, ICARUS, and LENA, will either discover proton decay or at the very least put new limits on proton lifetimes which would be an order of magnitude or more better than the current limits. In view of the huge effort that will go into these experiments it is incumbent on theorists to delineate more clearly the prediction for the proton lifetime in various models, compute the branching ratios and provide criteria for discrimination among models that survive the SuperK limits. Current analyses on proton lifetime could be improved on two fronts. First, the detailed branching ratios for many models have not been worked out and, second, new effort is needed in reducing uncertainties in absolute prediction rates. This award will provide funding for studies to fill in these gaps and provide the experimentalists with testable predictions of proton decay for a variety of unified models. They will investigate a new class of SO(10) models based on a unified Higgs sector for which proton decay has thus far not been calculated. Among broader impacts, it is proposed to investigate the correlations between proton stability, neutrino masses, and dark matter consistent with WMAP data. These theoretical efforts are essential for the analysis and interpretation of data from the proposed new generation of proton stability experiments at DUSEL and elsewhere, and it is only with such effort that the maximum benefit from the proposed experiments can accrue.