Speaker
Alexey Petrov
(University of South Carolina)
Description
The non-observation of baryon number violation suggests that the scale of baryon-number violating interactions at zero temperature is comparable to the GUT scale. However, the pertinent measurements involve hadrons made of the first-generation quarks, such as protons and neutrons. One may entertain the idea that new flavor physics breaks baryon number at a much lower scale, but only in the coupling to a third-generation quark, leading to observable baryon-number violating b-hadron decay rates. We will discuss such a scenario to show that indirect constraints on the new physics scale from the existing bounds on the proton lifetime do not allow for this possibility.
Author
Alexey Petrov
(University of South Carolina)