Speaker
Description
The difference between baryon- and lepton number, $B-L$, is a conserved charge in the Standard model. However, its violation is needed in order to explain the dynamical origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and possibly also neutrino masses. One way to search for $B-L$ violation is via proton decays, such as in the upcoming experiments at DUNE, JUNO, and Hyper-K. However, only proton decay modes with Standard model particles in the final state have been searched for so far. Long-lived new particles such as axions, scalar dark matter, sterile neutrinos, dark photons, etc, may also be involved in proton decays if their mass is sufficiently low. We provide a set of effective operators that could lead to such non-standard decay modes, and show how the resulting kinematics can be distinguished from the corresponding Standard model final states. Finally, we show how these modes could arise in SO(10) as well as a leptoquark model example.
