Employing nucleon decay as a fingerprint of SUSY GUT models using SusyTCProton

Abstract

Abstract While the observation of nucleon decay would be a smoking gun of Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) in general, the ratios between the decay rates of the various channels carry rich information about the specific GUT model realization. To investigate this fingerprint of GUT models in the context of supersymmetric (SUSY) GUTs, we present the software tool SusyTCProton, which is an extension of the module SusyTC to be used with the REAP package. It allows to calculate nucleon decay rates from the relevant dimension five GUT operators specified at the GUT scale, including the full loop-dressing at the SUSY scale. As an application, we investigate the fingerprints of two example GUT toy models with different flavor structures, performing an MCMC analysis to include the experimental uncertainties for the charged fermion masses and CKM mixing parameters. While both toy models provide equally good fits to the low energy data, we show how they could be distinguished via their predictions of ratios for nucleon decay rates. Together with SusyTCProton we also make the additional module ProtonDecay public. It can be used independently from REAP and allows to calculate nucleon decay rates from given D = 5 and D = 6 operator coefficients (accepting the required SUSY input for the D = 5 case in SLHA format). The D = 6 functionality can also be used to calculate nucleon decay in non-SUSY GUTs.