Indirect constraints on third generation baryon number violation

Abstract

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 therefore entertain the idea that new flavour 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. In this paper we show that indirect constraints on the new physics scale Λ_BNV from the existing bounds on the proton lifetime do not allow for this possibility. For this purpose we consider the three dominant proton decay channels p → \( {\ell}^{+}{\nu}_{\ell}\overline{\nu} \), p → \( {\pi}^{+}\overline{\nu} \) and p → π⁰ℓ⁺ mediated by a virtual bottom quark.