Suppression of proton decay in quantum gravity

Abstract

The bound on the proton lifetime is one of a small handful of observations that constrains physics not far from the Planck scale. This calls for a calculation of the proton lifetime in quantum gravity. Here, we calculate how quantum fluctuations of the metric impact four-fermion interactions which mediate proton decay. We find that quantum gravity lowers the scaling dimension of the four-fermion interaction, suppressing proton decay and raising the proton lifetime significantly. As a special case, we analyze asymptotically safe quantum gravity, in which we discover that proton-decay-mediating four-fermion interactions are strictly zero.

6 + 7 pages, 3 + 3 figures. Comments welcome. v2: Minor corrections, version as published