Use and . For each generation , the leptons are
Both are color singlets. The conjugate antilepton fields transform in the conjugate representations and have opposite hypercharge; they are already included by the conjugate fields in the Lagrangian. The two components of have electric charges , and has charge . There is no right-handed neutrino representation in this field content. These assignments use the electroweak representation and hypercharge table in the same hypercharge normalization as the scalar doublet.
For a doublet of hypercharge , define
The term is absent for a singlet. Under the local transformation , the gauge fields transform so that . Consequently the required gauge-covariant kinetic terms are
The fields of definite chirality are defined with . Since has hypercharge , the Yukawa interaction
is invariant: its hypercharges add to zero, and contracts the two doublet indices. A bare charged-lepton mass violates these assignments. No renormalizable neutrino Yukawa term is available without a right-handed neutrino. A gauge-invariant scalar potential depending on can select the nonzero vacuum, without altering these kinetic and Yukawa constructions.
There is an explicit local unitary gauge transformation whenever :
Thus, with the real field ,
This proves the polar coordinates for the electroweak Higgs doublet constructively. The gauge choice is local about the nonzero vacuum; it need not be nonsingular at zeros of the doublet.
The three identical-generation kinetic terms permit unitary flavor changes. A singular value decomposition gives with . Rotate both components of each left doublet together, and the right singlets independently. In this basis,
The left/right cross terms combine into this Dirac mass. Since the neutrinos have no mass matrix, their simultaneous left rotation preserves a diagonal charged current. This is charged-lepton Yukawa matrix diagonalization; the neutrinos remain massless in the stated renormalizable model.
The scalar kinetic term gives
Introduce and . The combinations , , and therefore diagonalize the quadratic terms:
The factor applies to the real neutral field, not to the complex charged field. The massless photon corresponds to the unbroken generator , which annihilates the vacuum. This gives the electroweak doublet gauge-boson mass matrix and its diagonal spectrum.
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.
Let , so . Direct multiplication of the Pauli matrices gives , equivalently . For this implies
Therefore transforms as the same weak fundamental representation doublet as , while complex conjugation reverses its hypercharge to . This is the Higgs conjugate doublet. The Yukawa coupling product is an singlet, and its hypercharges add to
It is consequently gauge-invariant and can supply an up-quark mass.
In unitary gauge, . Writing for the full arbitrary coefficient of the Yukawa coupling term, its physical form is
A one-generation field rephasing makes the mass positive, and its Higgs boson coupling is . The printed Yukawa expression has an additional trailing after which is never defined. If it denotes a constant, absorb it into ; in the conventional dimensionless Yukawa notation without that factor, . It does not affect the gauge-transformation argument.
For three families, use a singular value decomposition of the two mass matrices: and , with positive diagonal entries. The original left-handed weak current then becomes a current between mass eigenstates with
A complex matrix has eighteen real parameters, and imposes nine independent real conditions, leaving nine. A generic unitary matrix can be built from three complex plane rotations and three diagonal phases: each plane rotation supplies one angle and one phase. Thus these are three rotation angles and six phases. Rephase each of the six Dirac quark mass eigenfields, applying the same phase to its two chiralities so the diagonal masses stay real. A common phase changes no entry of , leaving five effective rephasings. Removing five of the six phases leaves three angles and one physical phase. This CKM parameter counting assumes generic nondegenerate masses; degeneracies give additional basis freedom.
Exactly massless neutrinos have an arbitrary unitary flavor rotation that changes no mass term. After diagonalizing the charged-lepton mass matrix, choose the neutrino basis with the same left-handed rotation. The apparent lepton charged-current mixing matrix becomes the identity. Thus mixing of exactly massless neutrinos is removable; it is not an analogue of physical CKM mixing.
For the requested CP symmetry calculation, write . The supplied charge conjugation transformations, with the fermion-reordering sign, give
For , use and the given gamma matrix relation to obtain
Under parity, the current acquires the Lorentz parity matrix and becomes . Under charge conjugation the charged vector also changes sign and becomes its conjugate. The two minus signs cancel, and the parity matrices cancel in the contracted operator. Consequently
With , the interaction is . Therefore
with the transformed density evaluated at . This is the CP transformation of a charged quark current.
Physical noninvariance requires a phase that cannot be removed by quark rephasings. The invariant quartet
is the Jarlskog invariant, where and in the standard three-angle parametrization. If , no allowed row/column phases can make the matrix real, and the charged-current interaction violates CP symmetry. For example all three angles with give .
The printed noninvariance claim is conditional on a nonzero physical phase. Arbitrary Yukawa matrices do not force it: , or any real CKM matrix, gives a CP-invariant charged-current interaction. The correct statement is generic CP violation when the irreducible phase is nontrivial, as explained by quark rephasing and CP conservation.
Finally a right-handed neutrino has gauge representation . Its Lorentz-invariant same-chirality bilinear with the field obtained by charge conjugation is therefore a gauge singlet and permits a Majorana mass term, conventionally
The factor is the usual convention for a field paired with itself; it may be absorbed into the printed coefficient. A Higgs Yukawa interaction can independently give a Dirac mass term. The Majorana term violates lepton number by two units but preserves the gauge symmetries. Corresponding terms for the other charged Standard Model fermions carry nonzero electric charge, and quarks also carry nontrivial color charge. Thus this gauge-invariant right-handed neutrino Majorana mass is allowed while those charged-fermion analogues are forbidden. Merely introducing a right-handed neutrino permits mass; vanishing mass coefficients would still leave it massless.
The derivative convention uses hypercharge Y with . For each lepton family , the left-handed fields form an SU(2) doublet , with . Their weak isospin values are and their electric charges are . The right-handed charged lepton is an SU(2) singlet, with , and charge . The minimal model used here has no right-handed neutrino. A sterile right-handed neutrino, if added as a singlet with , would have no charged weak current interaction. Antiparticles carry the conjugate representations and opposite electric charges.
Expanding supplies . The off-diagonal entries of are and . With the chiral projector , one has . Thus the two W boson interactions are
For quarks, separate rotations diagonalize the up-type and down-type mass terms. If their left-handed rotations are and , the charged interaction contains the CKM matrix :
There is an implicit sum over color charge. This quark mixing permits transitions between different families, rather than just the paired fields in a single doublet.
Let and . At momenta much smaller than , neglect derivatives in the heavy W boson equation. Its mass and source terms can be completed to a square:
This explicitly performs integrating out a charged vector boson. The resulting Fermi interaction is
The omitted terms contain derivatives and are relatively suppressed by momentum squared divided by .
For the leptonic pion decay, Lorentz covariance restricts a vacuum-to-spin-zero current matrix element to a constant times . In the rest frame, rotations eliminate the spatial components. Under parity, the temporal vector current is even, whereas the vacuum is even and the pion is odd, so its temporal matrix element equals its negative and vanishes. The temporal axial current is odd and is allowed. This proves the vacuum-to-pseudoscalar current selection rule, rather than merely assuming an axial current. Define the pion decay constant by
Then the vector-minus-axial charged weak current has matrix element , up to an irrelevant overall phase convention. Consequently the scattering amplitude for the decay can be written
Use , the momentum-space Dirac equation , and for a massless neutrino. Since , the neutrino contribution vanishes, leaving
The fermion spin sum is, using the supplied gamma matrix trace identities,
Here , , and . The mass term in the trace vanishes; anticommuting reduces the remaining trace to twice . It follows that
Using two-body decay phase space, with final momentum magnitude , gives the leptonic pseudoscalar decay width
Thus the requested factor is already present in the squared amplitude, and the phase space supplies one more threshold factor.
The physical explanation is helicity suppression. In the pion rest frame the two momenta are opposite. The massless antineutrino has positive helicity; zero total angular momentum would require the electron to have positive helicity too. The charged weak current instead creates a left-chiral electron, whose helicity is negative when its mass vanishes. A nonzero electron mass admits the required opposite helicity with an amplitude proportional to . The decay amplitude vanishes for , and the rate is suppressed by .
Write and use . The chain rule turns the renormalization-group beta function into
Integrating gives the one-loop inverse gauge coupling evolution
This expression applies over a range with unchanged active field content and in the perturbative regime. It uses , not .
For gauge coupling unification, define the normalized inverse couplings , , , and slopes , , . At the common scale each inverse coupling is . With ,
Subtract the equations for factors 1 and 2 to solve , then insert this into the difference of factors 3 and 2:
This one-loop normalized hypercharge unification relation requires . A scale above also requires the inferred to be positive. If those two slopes coincide, unification instead requires and their difference cannot fix the scale.
In the convention , one matter generation and one Higgs doublet have the following Standard Model representations. Spin is in units of ; L/R describe chirality, not the spin projection. The entry is its hypercharge eigenvalue, defining the one-dimensional representation .
FieldSpinChirality
Left
Right
Right
Left
Right
Not applicable
There is no right-handed neutrino in the minimal field content being counted. Right-handed matter can alternatively be written as left-handed charge-conjugate Weyl fermions, in conjugate colour representations with opposite hypercharges. The quadratic indices and squared charges in the beta coefficients are unchanged.
For , one generation supplies two colour fundamentals from and one each from . With three generations there are Weyl fermions counted as fundamental copies, and no coloured scalar. Thus
For , the three colours of give three weak-doublet copies and gives one. There are doublets across three generations and complex Higgs doublet, giving
These are spectator multiplicities in gauge beta functions: the colour index multiplies the weak contribution, while the weak index multiplies the colour contribution. Each two-component fermion is counted once; it must not be counted again as a separate antiparticle.
For , sum squared hypercharges over all colour and weak components. One generation gives
The two complex Higgs components give . There is no Abelian gauge self-interaction contribution. Therefore
The Higgs is counted only once for the whole model, whereas the fermionic generation is repeated three times. These are the Standard Model one-loop gauge coefficients in the unnormalized hypercharge convention. The grand-unified normalization instead has . The ratio of slopes in the unification relation is .
The local matrix is a gauge transformation in the representation acting on the matter field. With Hermitian Lie algebra generators it can be written locally in spacetime, and pointwise for , as
The real functions can instead include a factor of by redefining the transformation parameters. The gauge covariant derivative convention in this paper is . Inserting the stated transformed shows explicitly that the term cancels, giving .
In QCD, each quark field is in the colour fundamental representation , with . Thus its colour generators are eight matrices, conventionally for the Gell-Mann matrices; their number is not their matrix dimension. The eight gluons themselves transform in the adjoint representation of SU(3).
With , the pure Yang-Mills theory has Lagrangian . Put and . Since ,
The cross term has two derivative contributions. Interchange and then in the second; antisymmetry of makes it equal to the first. The cubic and quartic Yang-Mills self-interactions are therefore
The positive cubic sign follows from the negative term in the given Yang-Mills field strength; changing the covariant-derivative convention consistently changes intermediate signs.
For the left-handed quark doublet , the hypercharge is and the weak generators are . Its electroweak term is
The Pauli matrices give diagonal entries and off-diagonal entries . Expanding the term gives
In particular the off-diagonal weak charged current coupling is .
Write , . Invert the neutral-field rotation: , . The original PDF gives , so
The photon coefficients inside the derivative are for , and for . Multiplication by the in the kinetic Lagrangian gives the requested electromagnetic coupling of a weak multiplet:
Equivalently it is , making the electric charges explicit. The remaining neutral terms are . The TeX's missing prime in the mixing-angle ratio and truncated first Pauli matrix are conversion errors, not physical assumptions.
Use left-chiral superfields throughout, abbreviating the conjugate singlets by , , and . The printed hypercharge convention is the negative of the usual one, so ; consequently is the down-type and the up-type Higgs doublet. Write for the weak-doublet contraction. Assign baryon number , , and lepton number , ; both Higgs fields have .
The baryon number and lepton number conserving homogeneous cubic superpotential is
Each term has zero hypercharge, is a color and weak singlet, and has . Higgs expectation values give the usual quark and charged-lepton Yukawa interaction masses and, here, Dirac neutrino masses. The complete remaining cubic part is
The first two terms have , the third has , the fourth has , and the last has . Their Hermitian conjugates reverse these signs. Commutativity of chiral superfields and the antisymmetric weak/color contractions give and ; can be taken completely symmetric. All other coupling tensors are unrestricted complex tensors.
To check completeness, a cubic color singlet containing a quark doublet and an antiquark singlet must contain a colorless weak doublet; the allowed hypercharges give , and . Three color-antitriplet singlets can form a singlet with , but hypercharge permits only . Three quark doublets cannot be a weak singlet. With no colored fields, an even number of weak doublets is necessary. Two doublets and a singlet give precisely , , and ; contractions of two identical Higgs superfields vanish. With no doublets the only neutral triple is . Thus is the most general homogeneous cubic superpotential for the printed fields, including their singlet neutrinos.
If “cubic” is intended to mean a polynomial of degree at most three, also add
The term conserves both charges; the other nonconstant terms have respectively . This distinction will matter for the printed claim about R-parity.
For squark-mediated proton decay, choose and with or . The same down-type singlet squark can appear in both vertices; would give by antisymmetry. The first term includes an electron/up-quark/squark vertex, and the second an up-quark/down-quark/squark vertex. Exchanging a squark of mass and expanding its propagator at momenta much smaller than produces the dimension-six effective operator
The left- and right-handed pairs are separately contracted spinor bilinears. This operator converts an up/down quark pair into a positron and an antiquark; the spectator up quark can combine with the antiquark into the neutral pion. Equivalently its hadronic matrix element between a proton and a pion is permitted, so it induces . Having both the baryon number and lepton number violating vertices is what enables this channel.
Since has mass dimension , dimensional analysis gives
The dimensionless includes the hadronic matrix element and two-body phase space; the pion mass changes this factor rather than the leading dimensions. Dimensional grounds alone do not give a precise hadronic coefficient. Using the lifetime supplied in the paper, rather than substituting a different bound, gives and hence
For an illustrative squark this is about when is rounded to . The bound constrains the relevant flavour product and depends on the exchanged mass; separate smallness of each coupling does not follow without an additional assumption.
Define matter parity and R-parity by
Every matter superfield has , whereas and the vector superfields have . For ordinary quarks and antiquarks, is odd and , so . For charged leptons, neutrinos and their antiparticles, is odd and , again giving ; the singlet neutrino fermion obeys the same rule. Gluons, the photon, and have and spin one, hence ; Higgs bosons have and also . Thus every Standard Model particle is R-even, including the corresponding antiparticles. Changing spin by one half within a supermultiplet reverses , so squarks, sleptons, gauginos and Higgsinos are R-odd.
Each conserving cubic term contains two R-odd matter superfields and one even Higgs superfield, so it is even under matter parity. Each term in has an odd number of matter superfields: three for , and one for . All are therefore forbidden. At the component level the two fermion spin factors in a Yukawa interaction multiply to , so the same selection rule follows directly from R-parity. This verifies all cubic baryon/lepton-number violating terms are forbidden while the Yukawa fermion mass terms survive.
The blanket assertion needs a qualification beyond homogeneous cubic terms. The Higgs term is even; and are odd and forbidden. But is even and permits a Majorana neutrino mass despite violating lepton number by two. Likewise the higher-dimensional operators and are even. Consequently R-parity alone does not enforce all-order conservation of baryon number and lepton number, or absolute proton stability; the stated precise exclusion holds for the violating cubic interactions above.
Two physical implications follow from multiplicative conservation of R-parity. Superpartners are produced in even numbers from an initial state consisting only of Standard Model particles, leading to pair production at the lowest threshold and parity-conserving cascades. The lightest supersymmetric particle is stable, since one R-odd particle cannot decay exclusively into R-even particles and no lighter R-odd state is available. A neutral weakly interacting lightest supersymmetric particle can therefore be a dark-matter candidate and produce missing-energy signatures; neutrality and a suitable abundance require further model assumptions.
Use metric and the hypercharge convention . Then the Higgs doublet has and transforms under electroweak gauge invariance as
The covariant derivative sign consistent with the requested expression is
A convention that instead calls the doublet hypercharge one puts in the charge generator and derivative; the physical coupling is the same. Here and the matrix-valued connection transforms as , making transform like .
In unitary gauge, the upper component of the derivative comes from the off-diagonal Pauli matrices:
The lower component is
Writing , , inversion of the neutral rotation gives and . Since , the coefficient of the photon vanishes, whereas . Thus
The zero photon coupling expresses the neutrality of the surviving radial Higgs boson.
The scalar Lagrangian density is . Adding gives the complete bosonic electroweak Lagrangian density. Its scalar and vector mass terms, after electroweak symmetry breaking, are obtained directly as
Indeed, the shifted quartic Higgs potential normalization gives . Comparing with a canonically normalized real scalar mass term, a complex vector mass term and a real vector mass term yields
The extra factor one half in this paper's Higgs potential is why is , rather than in another common convention. The tree-level electroweak gauge-boson masses give : measure the two vector masses and take their ratio. Beyond tree level this extraction requires a specified renormalization convention and radiative corrections.
Expanding the vector terms gives the cubic and quartic Higgs couplings to electroweak gauge bosons:
The four elementary Feynman diagrams and their all-incoming Feynman rules are shown below. Differentiating with respect to two identical fields supplies a factor two; differentiating with respect to two identical Higgs fields supplies another factor two in the quartic rules.
Figure 1.
Tree-level Higgs vertices with charged and neutral electroweak gauge bosons
. Details.
There are no elementary , , or vertices in this tree-level Lagrangian density. Loop-induced photon interactions are a different order. The scalar self-interactions, if included, have rules and .
The prime LEP2 search used the Higgs boson coupling to Z bosons through Higgsstrahlung, , shown in the first panel of the process figure in Question 3. This identifies an associated-production interaction, rather than an on-shell decay of a single into a heavier Higgs. The channel's historical role is documented in the LEP2 Higgs-search account.
For the free charged W boson, take , with the conjugate field carrying . In the action, multiplying the two field strengths gives . Therefore
To invert it, separate the transverse and longitudinal projectors , . The operator is , so
Since the quadratic action kernel is , its Proca propagator is
For all momentum components small relative to , the low-momentum limit is , with corrections of relative order or . This local limit leads to the Fermi interaction, with for the charged-current normalization used here.
Write and use . The renormalization-group beta function implies
Integrating the one-loop running coupling equation gives
Here the sign of is the sign convention in the question: a negative coefficient makes the inverse coupling increase towards high energy.
For gauge coupling unification, let and let be the common inverse coupling at the unification scale. The normalized hypercharge coupling is , so
Subtract the second relation from the first to determine , then subtract it from the third. Provided , this proves
The factors belong to the inverse normalized coupling; dropping them changes the prediction.
Use the Standard Model gauge group and convention . One fermion family and one complex Higgs doublet have the following Standard Model representations. The left-handed quark and lepton doublets contain two Weyl spinors each; the right-handed fields are single Weyl species.
The row denotes the right-handed up quark. Equivalently an all-left-handed table replaces the three right-handed fields by , , and ; these are alternative descriptions, not extra fermions. The minimal model has no right-handed neutrino. For completeness, the family-independent gauge fields are the spin-one gluons , weak gauge bosons , and hypercharge gauge boson ; they are not counted once per family.
For the Standard Model one-loop gauge coefficients, include three fermion families and one Higgs doublet. With , the colour Dynkin index sum in one family is
The first factor two counts the two members of ; the colour trace is already included in the Dynkin index. There is no coloured scalar. Hence
For , the three colours of and the lepton doublet give per family. The Higgs contributes . Thus
For , sum squared hypercharges over every colour and doublet component. One family contributes
The two complex Higgs components contribute . There is no Abelian gauge self-interaction term, so
This is for the unnormalized coupling used in the question. For , the corresponding coefficient is . This distinction is required for a consistent unification calculation.
Use hypercharge normalized by , and express all matter fermions as left-handed Weyl spinors. Thus denote the charge conjugates of the right-handed Standard Model fermions; the superscript is unrelated to the antiparticle marker . Each chiral superfield contains a complex scalar field and a Weyl spinor, while each vector superfield contains a gauge boson and a gaugino. The complete propagating content of the Minimal supersymmetric Standard Model before electroweak symmetry breaking is:
SectorComponent field representationSpinFamilies or copies
, quark Weyl spinors
, squarks
, quark Weyl spinor
, squark
, quark Weyl spinor
, squark
, lepton Weyl spinors
, sleptons
, lepton Weyl spinor
, slepton
, Higgs complex scalar fields
, higgsinos
, Higgs complex scalar fields
, higgsinos
Color vector multiplet, gluons adjoint,
Color vector multiplet, gluinos adjoint,
Weak vector multiplet, weak gauge bosons adjoint,
Weak vector multiplet, winos adjoint,
Hypercharge vector multiplet, hypercharge gauge boson
Hypercharge vector multiplet, bino
The marker means that conjugate antiparticle states must also be counted: a charged Weyl spinor has a particle helicity and a distinct antiparticle helicity, and a complex scalar field has particle and antiparticle excitations. The real adjoint gauge bosons and adjoint Majorana fermions already contain their conjugate states, so no extra marker is attached to them. For example, the charged combinations are both contained in the one real weak triplet. There are no right-handed-neutrino chiral superfields, no gravitino, and no propagating auxiliary fields in this field table. The matter sector has gauge components; the two Higgs chiral doublets add four. Thus the count is , before mass effects are considered.
R-parity is the multiplicative discrete quantum number , with baryon number , lepton number and spin . Ordinary quarks, leptons, Higgs scalars and gauge bosons have ; their sparticles have . For superfields the equivalent rule is matter parity : are odd, and and the gauge superfields are even. With contracting weak indices and implicit color contractions, the renormalizable R-parity-conserving MSSM superpotential is
Signs of the three Yukawa couplings can be absorbed into their matrices. Every term has even matter parity and zero hypercharge; holomorphy requires the two independent Higgs chiral doublets, rather than using in a superpotential.
Conserved R-parity forces an even number of odd particles in a process whose incoming particles are all ordinary particles, so colliders produce sparticles in pairs or another even multiplicity. Their decay chains end in the stable lightest supersymmetric particle. A neutral, weakly interacting lightest supersymmetric particle, commonly a neutralino after electroweak symmetry breaking, escapes the detector and gives missing transverse momentum; it is also a possible dark matter constituent. Stability alone does not establish its relic abundance, and a charged or colored stable lightest supersymmetric particle is not the usual viable dark matter candidate. Conserved R-parity forbids the renormalizable interactions responsible for the decay below. It does not by itself forbid higher-dimensional proton-decay operators: the superpotential operators and have even matter parity. Thus the renormalizable R-parity-conserving MSSM protects the proton, while ultraviolet physics can still induce its decay.
The gauge-invariant renormalizable R-parity-violating superpotential is
Here and because of the weak and color antisymmetric contractions. The first two trilinear terms and the bilinear term violate lepton number, whereas the term violates baryon number. The are dimensionless and has mass dimension one.
For a concrete squark-mediated proton decay channel, take and nonzero. Antisymmetry allows these indices: the exchanged scalar is a strange squark, not a repeated down flavor in . Two quarks in the proton undergo ; the spectator combines with into the component of . The baryon-violating Feynman vertex and lepton-violating Feynman vertex give .
Figure 1.
Proton decay through baryon- and lepton-number-violating strange-squark exchange
. Details.
At momenta small compared with the squark mass , its scalar propagator is of order . Eliminating it generates a dimension-six four-fermion proton-decay operator, schematically , with coefficient . Consequently the dimensionless decay amplitude is of order , and phase space supplies one more power of to the width:
This is a dimensional estimate; phase-space constants and hadronic matrix elements change its coefficient, not its fourth-power dependence on . For order-one couplings and , the stated lifetime limit is . Therefore , giving .
Such a mass is incompatible with the intended weak-scale MSSM explanation of the hierarchy problem: squarks that cancel the Higgs-sector sensitivity to high scales must not introduce a new enormous splitting from their light quark partners. For example, with order-one couplings would give only . The field content alone does not mathematically prohibit extremely heavy superpartners, but that choice sacrifices the weak-scale naturalness motivation. The usual resolution is conserved R-parity, or sufficiently suppressed simultaneous baryon number and lepton number violation, rather than making the exchanged squark this heavy.