Three lepton decay modes of the proton

Abstract

We consider the three lepton decay modes of the proton within the proton decay interpretation of the atmospheric neutrino anomaly. We construct higher dimensional operators in the framework of the standard model. The operators which allow the particularly interesting decay mode are of dimension 10 involving $SU(2)_L$ non-singlet higgs. We show how these operators can be comparable to the dimension 9 operators. We then present a simple left-right symmetric model which can give rise to the desired proton decay modes of the right order of magnitude.