B-tau unification and large atmospheric mixing: a case for a noncanonical seesaw mechanism

A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case

This paper describes the physics case for a new fixed target facility at CERN SPS. The SHiP (search for hidden particles) experiment is intended to hunt for new physics in the largely unexplored domain of very weakly interacting particles with masses below the Fermi scale, inaccessible to the LHC experiments, and to study tau neutrino physics. The same proton beam setup can be used later to look for decays of tau-leptons with lepton flavour number non-conservation, [Formula: see text] and to search for weakly-interacting sub-GeV dark matter candidates. We discuss the evidence for physics beyond the standard model and describe interactions between new particles and four different portals-scalars, vectors, fermions or axion-like particles. We discuss motivations for different models, manifesting themselves via these interactions, and how they can be probed with the SHiP experiment and present several case studies. The prospects to search for relatively light SUSY and composite particles at SHiP are also discussed. We demonstrate that the SHiP experiment has a unique potential to discover new physics and can directly probe a number of solutions of beyond the standard model puzzles, such as neutrino masses, baryon asymmetry of the Universe, dark matter, and inflation.

B-L violating proton decay modes and new baryogenesis scenario in SO(10)

We show that grand unified theories based on SO(10) generate quite naturally baryon number violating dimension seven operators that violate B-L, and lead to novel nucleon decay modes such as n→e(-)K(+), e(-)π(+) and p→νπ(+). We find that in two-step breaking schemes of nonsupersymmetric SO(10), the partial lifetimes for these modes can be within reach of experiments. The interactions responsible for these decay modes also provide a new way to understand the origin of matter in the Universe via the decays of grand unified theory (GUT) scale scalar bosons of SO(10). Their (B-L)-violating nature guarantees that the GUT scale induced baryon asymmetry is not washed out by the electroweak sphaleron interactions. In minimal SO(10) models this asymmetry is closely tied to the masses of quarks, leptons and the neutrinos.

Proton decay and flavor violating thresholds in SO(10) models

Discovery of neutrino mass has put the spotlight on the supersymmetric (SUSY) SO(10) model as a natural candidate for grand unification of forces and matter. However, the suppression of proton decay is a major problem in such SUSY grand unified models. In this Letter we show how to alleviate this problem by simple threshold effects which raise the colored Higgsino masses and the grand unification scale to greater than or similar to 10(17) GeV. There exist only four types of fields arising from different SO(10) representations which can generate this kind of threshold effect. Some of these fields also generate a sizable flavor violation in the quark sector compared to the lepton sector. The b-tau unification can work in these types of models even for intermediate values of tanbeta.

Bs-Bs mixing in grand unified models

We study Bs-Bs mixing in supersymmetry grand unified SO(10), SU(5) models where the mixings among the second and third generation squarks arise due to the existence of flavor violating sources in the Dirac and Majorana couplings which are responsible for neutrino mixings. We find that when the branching ratio of tau-->mugamma decay is enhanced to be around the current experimental bound, Bs-Bs mixing may also contain large contribution from supersymmetry in the SO(10) boundary condition. Consequently, the phase of Bs-Bs mixing is large (especially for small tanbeta and large scalar mass m0) and can be tested by measuring CP asymmetries of Bs decay modes.

Radiative seesaw mechanism and degenerate neutrinos

The radiative seesaw mechanism of Witten generates the right-handed neutrino masses in SO(10) with the spinorial 16(H) Higgs field. We study here analytically the 2nd and 3rd generations for the minimal Yukawa structure containing and Higgs representations. In the approximation of small 2nd generation masses and gauge loop domination we find the following results: (1) beta-tau unification, (2) natural coexistence between large theta(l) and small theta(q), and (3) degenerate neutrinos.

Suppressing proton decay in the minimal SO(10) model

We show that in a class of minimal supersymmetric SO(10) models which have been found to be quite successful in predicting neutrino mixings, all proton decay modes can be suppressed by a particular choice of Yukawa textures. The required texture not only fits all lepton and quark masses as well as Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa parameters, but it also predicts neutrino mixing parameter U(e3) and Dirac CP phase sin(/delta(MNS)/ to be 0.07-0.09 and 0.3-0.7, respectively.