Baryon number violation involving tau leptons

TL;DR

This paper explores how baryon number violation involving tau leptons can lead to novel nucleon decay channels, including many-body decays with tau neutrinos, expanding the scope of beyond Standard Model physics searches.

Contribution

It demonstrates that tau-involving operators can cause nucleon decays with tau neutrinos, proposing new decay channels not previously searched for.

Findings

Tau-involving operators induce nucleon decays with tau neutrinos.

Many-body decay channels like p→ηπ+ν_τ are possible and unexplored.

Existing two-body searches constrain some operators, but many remain unconstrained.

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 $p\to \pi^+\nu$, other operators induce many-body decays such as $p \to \eta \pi^{+} \bar\nu_\tau$ and $n\to K^+ \pi^-\nu_\tau$ that have never been searched for.