Baryon number violation involving tauons

Julian Heeck, Dima Watkins

Published 2024-05-28Version 1

Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, especially through the study of nucleon decays. Angular momentum conservation requires a lepton in the final state of such decays, kinematically restricted to electrons, muons, or neutrinos. We show that operators involving tauons, which are at first sight too heavy to play a role in nucleon decays, still lead to clean nucleon decay channels with tau neutrinos. While many of them are already constrained from existing two-body searches such as $p\to \pi^+\nu$, other operators induce many-body decays such as $p \to \eta \pi^{+} \bar\nu_\tau$ and $n\to K^+ \pi^-\nu_\tau$ that have never been searched for.