Antimuon Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
Baryon plus lepton number 2026-09-28
Baryon plus lepton number is the sum of baryon number and lepton number. It is an accidental classical symmetry of the renormalizable Standard Model but has an chiral anomaly, so electroweak instantons and sphalerons violate it.
For the MSSM superfield representations augmented by singlet right-handed neutrino chiral superfields , the homogeneous cubic gauge-invariant superpotential contains the four Yukawa structures , , , and the additional structures , , , , . Weak-doublet pairs contract with the antisymmetric two-index tensor; contracts with the color three-index tensor. Consequently the coefficient is antisymmetric in its two indices, the coefficient in its two indices, and the coefficient symmetric. With , the last five structures violate baryon number or lepton number, whereas the first four conserve both. Singlet fields must not be omitted when classifying a general cubic superpotential.
The R-parity violation vertices from and can both contain the same down-type squark. Write its linear couplings as and its mass term as . Eliminating it gives . The cross term is , with the color Levi-Civita symbol contracting the three quarks. It changes baryon number and lepton number together and supplies the dimension-six proton-decay operator for . The two down-flavor indices in must differ, so strange- or bottom-squark exchange is allowed but identical down flavors vanish.
A right-handed neutrino is a singlet of the entire Standard Model gauge group. Its same-chirality bilinear with the field obtained by charge conjugation therefore admits the displayed renormalizable Majorana mass term, in addition to a Higgs-induced Dirac mass term. It violates lepton number by two units. Analogous terms for electrically charged Standard Model fermions carry nonzero electric charge; quarks also have nontrivial color charge. The presence of a right-handed field permits mass but does not force a nonzero mass parameter.
Lepton Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
A lepton is a Standard Model fermion without color charge. The charged leptons have electric charge and their corresponding neutrinos have charge zero. There are three generations; their antiparticles carry opposite electric charge and lepton number. Charged leptons and neutrinos have lepton number , with the corresponding antiparticles carrying .
For the gauge-singlet composite , the interaction is electroweak gauge-invariant. At the Higgs field vacuum, , giving . The Grassmann variation of a chiral Majorana mass term therefore identifies the mass parameter as , with physical mass . The dimension-five interaction has a coupling of mass dimension minus one. Under lepton number phase rotation, its two terms acquire factors , so it violates continuous lepton number by two units. It is an effective extension of the minimal renormalizable Standard Model.
Matter parity assigns to every matter chiral superfield, including a singlet describing a conjugate right-handed neutrino, and to Higgs chiral superfields. Thus the quadratic superpotential term is even, although it changes lepton number by two. The higher-degree operators and are also even and violate baryon number or lepton number. Exact R-parity therefore forbids the renormalizable trilinear violations , , , , , but does not imply conservation of these continuous charges in every allowed interaction.
MSSM superpotential 2026-10-14
With hypercharge normalized by , the renormalizable R-parity-conserving MSSM superpotential is , with . Additional renormalizable R-parity violation allows . The two antisymmetries are and . The first, second and fourth additional terms violate lepton number; the third violates baryon number.
Muon Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
The muon is the negatively charged second-generation lepton, with electric charge and lepton number . Its antiparticle is the antimuon.
Muon neutrino Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
The muon neutrino is the neutral lepton coupled to a muon by the weak charged current. It carries lepton number ; its antineutrino has the opposite lepton number.
Keep the PDF's hypercharge signs, which are the negatives of the frequently used convention. Write for the displayed chiral superfields. Their gauge group representations are conjugate right-handed-matter representations; their Weyl spinor components are left-chiral charge conjugates. Thus assign baryon number , , and lepton number , , with both Higgs fields neutral under . The corresponding electromagnetic convention is .
Let contract the two weak doublets, and use the color Levi-Civita symbol for three color antitriplets. The most general homogeneous cubic superpotential with right-handed-neutrino superfields separates as , where
and
Repeated generation and color indices are summed. The four Yukawa coupling matrices are arbitrary. The weak and color contractions imply and , while is completely symmetric. The terms have ; has ; and have respectively . Their conjugate interactions have the opposite changes. All four Yukawa terms preserve both numbers; all five remaining types violate at least one. In particular, the neutral fields printed in the PDF require both and terms.
For completeness of this list, a cubic color gauge-invariant can contain a – or – pair and one colorless doublet, or three color antitriplets. Vanishing hypercharge gives , , and . Three doublets have no weak singlet. Among colorless terms, two doublets and a singlet give , , and ; the apparent contraction vanishes since the identical bosonic superfields commute. Three singlets yield only . This also explains why no omitted cubic monomial is available. The word cubic excludes the linear term and the quadratic , , terms; these are separate possible terms in the full renormalizable superpotential.
To demonstrate squark-mediated proton decay, take and with or . Identical down-flavor indices would make vanish. Both interactions couple to the same scalar of mass . Suppressing overall convention-dependent vertex signs, their relevant two-component fermion bilinears are
The color index on is contracted with that on ; Lorentz spinor indices within each bilinear are contracted too. Together with , its algebraic equation at momenta small compared with gives . Substitution gives , whose cross term is the four-fermion matching for squark-mediated proton decay
Its electron term contains three quark fields of flavors and a lepton, and changes baryon number and lepton number together. The Hermitian-conjugate terms describe both orientations of the process. The hadronic matrix element of the three-quark proton-decay operator between a proton and a neutral pion has the right quantum numbers and is not forbidden by a remaining symmetry. Hence the operator permits : the lepton field creates the positron and the three-quark matrix element connects the proton to the pion. This supplies the mechanism rather than merely naming the two violating interactions.
Each fermion field has mass dimension , so this effective operator has dimension six and coefficient . By dimensional analysis its contribution to the decay rate has the form
Here collects phase space, running and the dimensionless hadronic factor; a dimensional estimate takes it of order unity rather than pretending to calculate a strong-interaction matrix element. Assuming this exchange dominates and there is no tuned cancellation, the supplied lifetime gives the proton-lifetime bound on a product of R-parity-violating couplings
The last estimate uses and . Keeping instead changes to about . A numerical limit independent of the squark mass or hadronic factor is not determined by the supplied data.
Finally, matter parity is : all matter chiral superfields, including , are odd, and the Higgs chiral superfields are even. R-parity of a component field is . In a superpotential, the spin factor is irrelevant to the allowed monomials: each of has two odd matter factors and is even. Each of has three odd matter factors, and has one, so all are odd and forbidden. Higgs vacuum expectation values are even; the allowed Yukawa interactions therefore still generate ordinary fermion masses.
R-parity forbids all the baryon/lepton-number-violating cubic terms above, not every possible violating operator. In particular, is even under matter parity but changes lepton number by two: matter parity allows Majorana neutrino masses. Thus the literal unrestricted claim would be false for these very fields; its valid cubic interpretation gives precisely the requested exclusion while preserving the Yukawa coupling mass terms.
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.