Proton Lifetime Upper Bound in Non-SUSY SU(5) GUT

Abstract

In preparation for upcoming nucleon decay searches at Hyper-Kamiokande, it is important to derive a theoretical upper bound on the proton lifetime in a general class of grand unified theory (GUT) models. In this paper, we make an attempt along this direction for non-SUSY SU(5) models, under the mild restrictions that only one or two SM-decomposed multiplets are singularly light, and that the SU(5) gauge theory is asymptotically free and thus there are no too large representations in the model. We derive criteria for SM-decomposed multiplets that potentially enhance the proton lifetime when they are singularly light. We perform a numerical analysis on the proton lifetime and show that some choices of singularly light multiplets can provide a testable upper bound on the proton lifetime.