Neutrinos and proton decay: signal from grand unification ((05) N05)

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Neutrinos may conceivably play a key role in our attempts of probing physics at a more fundamental level. The see-saw mechanism involves a scale which is comparable to the gauge coupling unification scale in the supersymmetric extension of the standard model. The observed longevity of the proton suggests also a rather high suppression scale of higher-dimensional operators. Alternatively, the neutrino Yukawa couplings and the proton decay operators may be suppressed by appropriate symmetries. In this case, one may explain light Dirac neutrinos, which might have important implications for the background neutrinos. The aim of this project is to work out a coherent picture by supplementing the experimental data with the consistency conditions in explicit string-derived models. Various alternatives to the standard see-saw scenario will be explored.