The landscape of baryon number violation

Baryon number violation is possibly our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model. For half a century, the theoretical and experimental focus has been on effective dimension-six operators which induce clean two-body nucleon decays. In this talk I, will emphasize that baryon number violation is much more than that. Even at mass dimension six, it is possible to end up with dominant three-body decays, and at higher mass dimension high-multiplicity final states become even more common. Weinberg has shown long ago that higher-dimensional operators could dominate over the d=6 ones if some linear combinations of baryon and lepton numbers are imposed as symmetries. I will show that some UV completions automatically come with such a symmetry, i.e. it emerges as an accidental symmetry. Some UV completions can even lead to accidentally-dominant operators that are not singled out by baryon and lepton numbers; these lead to genuine loop realizations of baryon-number-violating operators. Time permitting, I will also talk about light new physics in connection to baryon number violation.

321 Allen Hall and Zoom

https://pitt.zoom.us/j/98189620916

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