Effect of Hadron Dynamics on the Proton Lifetime

Abstract

A detailed, quantitative re-examination of the effect of hadron dynamics on baryon decay, modeled in terms of Skyrme-field tunneling, indicates that any hadronic suppression should be quite mild. This appears to be another illustration of the `Cheshire-cat' phenomenon, that variation of the apportionment between description of the nucleon as a bag of quarks and description as a Skyrme field configuration has little influence on many nucleon properties. Perhaps the largest remaining uncertainty in evaluating the decay rate has to do with the overlap between a specified quark-antiquark configuration and a final meson state.

minor corrections, 19 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Measurement of the rate of nu_e + d --> p + p + e^- interactions produced by 8B solar neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
• Constraints on Neutrino Oscillations Using 1258 Days of Super-Kamiokande Solar Neutrino Data