Prof. Alexey Petrov, University of South Carolina

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 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.