Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2002/iii/paper-68/4/solution

Use the printed hypercharge convention; reversing every hypercharge relative to another common convention does not change the gauge invariants. Write for the singlet chiral superfields labelled with a superscript in the paper, and define the weak-doublet contraction . The most general homogeneous cubic superpotential with right-handed-neutrino superfields separates as , where
and
Repeated generation and color indices are summed. Because the chiral superfields commute while the gauge contractions are antisymmetric,
The factors and remove the corresponding overcounting.
Here is a completeness check, not merely a list of possible terms. A color-singlet cubic can have no colored fields, a fundamental–antifundamental pair, or three fundamentals or three antifundamentals. A colored pair must be or : the remaining weak doublet and hypercharge select respectively or . Three antifundamentals allow only at zero hypercharge; three doublets have no weak singlet. With no colored fields, weak invariance requires zero or two doublets. Two positive-hypercharge doublets require , giving and , while . Opposite-hypercharge doublets require , giving and . With no doublets, only has zero hypercharge. These are exactly the nine structures above.
For baryon number and lepton number, assign
and zero charges to the Higgs fields. This is the conjugate-singlet convention, so the neutrino Yukawa coupling conserves lepton number. The first four terms conserve both charges. The and terms carry , the term carries , the term carries , and carries . The gauge-singlet neutrino interactions must therefore be included in the violating sector.
If “cubic” instead means a polynomial of degree at most three, there are also the lower-degree gauge invariants
The Higgs mass term conserves both charges; , and violate lepton number. These additional terms distinguish the full renormalizable superpotential from its homogeneous cubic part.
To obtain squark-mediated proton decay, combine a lepton number-violating vertex with a baryon number-violating vertex. A nonzero example is with , exchanging the singlet strange quark squark of mass . The antisymmetry forbids , so using three first-generation singlets would not be a valid example. The relevant component vertices contain and , with the required color contraction. Connecting one vertex to the complex conjugate of the other through the massive scalar propagator produces schematically
Parentheses denote Lorentz scalar two-spinor contractions, dotted for the right-handed pair and undotted for the left-handed pair. This dimension-six proton-decay operator contains the three quarks and an electron field that can create a Positron. Its hadronic matrix element gives the channel . The internal strange flavor need not appear in the final state. The two interactions together violate both continuous charges, as required for this channel.
The coefficient of the dimension-six effective operator has mass dimension . Thus dimensional analysis gives
where is a dimensionless hadronic and phase-space factor. Its detailed value cannot be fixed by dimensional reasoning. Applying the historical lower bound supplied in the paper gives the proton-lifetime bound on a product of R-parity-violating couplings
The numerical coefficient is only the accuracy of the requested dimensional estimate; the squark mass was not fixed by the question.
Finally, R-parity is . At the superfield level use matter parity : are odd and are even. Each conserving Yukawa coupling contains two matter chiral superfields and one Higgs field, so it is even. Every violating homogeneous cubic above is odd: contain three matter fields, while contains one. R-parity forbids all the listed cubic violations and preserves the Yukawa terms that generate fermion masses. The Higgs bilinear is also even, whereas the lepton bilinear and the singlet linear term are odd.
The final assertion must not be read as forbidding every possible violation of continuous baryon number or lepton number. In particular, matter parity allows Majorana neutrino masses: is even but carries , a concrete counterexample once quadratic terms are included. Higher-dimensional operators such as and are likewise even and violate the continuous charges. The verified statement here concerns the homogeneous cubic sector, including the neutrino singlet terms.

New to topics? Read the docs here!