DUSEL R&D: Testing Theories of Proton Stability and Unification at DUSEL

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)提供资金的。深部地下科学与工程实验室(DUSEL)将在加速器实验无法到达的极短距离内探索新的物理。具体地说，拟议中的杜塞尔质子稳定性实验，以及HyperK、MEMPHYS、ICARUS和Lena的新一代实验，将要么发现质子衰变，要么至少对质子寿命设定新的限制，这将是一个数量级或更好于目前的限制。考虑到这些实验将会付出巨大的努力，理论家有责任更清楚地描述各种模型中质子寿命的预测，计算分支比，并提供区分超过Superk极限的模型的标准。目前对质子寿命的分析可以从两个方面加以改进。首先，许多模型的详细分支比率尚未确定，其次，在减少绝对预测率的不确定性方面需要做出新的努力。这一奖项将为填补这些空白的研究提供资金，并为实验者提供各种统一模型的质子衰变的可测试预测。他们将研究一类新的基于统一希格斯扇区的SO(10)模型，目前为止还没有计算过该扇区的质子衰变。在更广泛的影响中，有人建议调查与WMAP数据一致的质子稳定性、中微子质量和暗物质之间的相关性。这些理论努力对于分析和解释杜塞尔和其他地方拟议的新一代质子稳定性实验的数据是必不可少的，只有这样的努力才能从拟议的实验中获得最大利益。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) will explore new physics at extremely short distances not accessible to accelerator experiments. Specifically, the proposed proton stability experiments at DUSEL, along with a new generation of experiments at HyperK, MEMPHYS, ICARUS, and LENA, will either discover proton decay or at the very least put new limits on proton lifetimes which would be an order of magnitude or more better than the current limits. In view of the huge effort that will go into these experiments it is incumbent on theorists to delineate more clearly the prediction for the proton lifetime in various models, compute the branching ratios and provide criteria for discrimination among models that survive the SuperK limits. Current analyses on proton lifetime could be improved on two fronts. First, the detailed branching ratios for many models have not been worked out and, second, new effort is needed in reducing uncertainties in absolute prediction rates. This award will provide funding for studies to fill in these gaps and provide the experimentalists with testable predictions of proton decay for a variety of unified models. They will investigate a new class of SO(10) models based on a unified Higgs sector for which proton decay has thus far not been calculated. Among broader impacts, it is proposed to investigate the correlations between proton stability, neutrino masses, and dark matter consistent with WMAP data. These theoretical efforts are essential for the analysis and interpretation of data from the proposed new generation of proton stability experiments at DUSEL and elsewhere, and it is only with such effort that the maximum benefit from the proposed experiments can accrue.