Comprehensive investigation of nucleon decays into one lepton plus two mesons

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical analysis of nucleon decays into one lepton and two mesons, deriving new constraints on decay modes using effective field theory and existing experimental bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic method to relate three-body nucleon decay widths to Wilson coefficients within the LEFT framework, improving limits on multiple decay channels.

Findings

Derived decay width expressions using chiral perturbation theory.

Used experimental bounds on two-body decays to constrain Wilson coefficients.

Established significantly stronger partial lifetime bounds for 22 three-body decay modes.

Abstract

We systematically investigate baryon number violating (BNV) nucleon decays into one lepton ($e,\mu,\nu/\bar\nu$) and two pseudoscalar mesons ($\pi\pi,\pi\eta,\pi K$) within the low-energy effective field theory (LEFT) framework. By employing chiral perturbation theory, we obtain general expressions for the decay widths of these three-body nucleon decay modes induced by dimension-6 LEFT BNV operators and express them in terms of the associated Wilson coefficients. Since the same set of LEFT operators contribute to the experimentally well-constrained two-body nucleon decays, we then utilize the experimental bounds on them to constrain the relevant Wilson coefficients. From the obtained constraints, we derive improved limits on the occurrence of 22 three-body modes involving a charged lepton and 9 modes containing a neutrino or an antineutrino, with the new partial lifetime bounds being orders of magnitude stronger than the existing experimental limits. Our framework and derived bounds will facilitate future experimental searches for these nucleon decays.