Proton Decay Prediction in 5D Gauge-Higgs Unification
Abstract
The Higgs boson mass and top quark mass imply that the Higgs quartic coupling vanishes around the scale of 109 - 1013 GeV, depending on the precise value of the top quark mass. The vanishing quartic coupling can be naturally addressed if the Higgs field originates from a 5-dimensional gauge field and the 5th dimension is compactified at the scale of the vanishing Higgs quartic coupling, which is a scenario based on gauge-Higgs unification. We present a general prediction of the scenario on the proton decay process p π0 e+. In many gauge-Higgs unification models, the 1st generation fermions are localized towards an orbifold fixed point in order to realize the realistic Yukawa couplings. Hence, four-fermion operators responsible for the proton decay can appear with a suppression of the 5-dimensional Planck scale (not the 4-dimensional Planck scale). Since the 5-dimensional Planck scale is connected to the compactification scale, we have a correlation between the proton partial decay width and the top quark mass. We show that the future Hyper-Kamiokande experiment may discover the proton decay if the top quark pole mass is larger than about 172.5 GeV.