Baryon number violation involving tau leptons

Abstract

Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, especially through the study of nucleon decays. Angular momentum conservation requires a lepton in the final state of such decays, kinematically restricted to electrons, muons, or neutrinos. We show that operators involving taus, which are at first sight too heavy to play a role in nucleon decays, still lead to clean nucleon decay channels with tau neutrinos. While many of them are already constrained from existing two-body searches such as $p\to \pi^+\nu$, other operators induce many-body decays such as $p \to \eta \pi^{+} \bar\nu_\tau$ and $n\to K^+ \pi^-\nu_\tau$ that have never been searched for.