Grand Unification in Extra Dimensions and Proton Decay.pdfVIP

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 1 0 5 3 2 1 v 1 3 0 M a y 2 0 0 1 GRAND UNIFICATION IN EXTRA DIMENSIONS AND PROTON DECAY FERRUCCIO FERUGLIO Department of Physics, University of Padova and I.N.F.N, Sezione di Padova, Via Marzolo 8 Padova - Italy We discuss baryon and lepton violation in the context of a simple 5-dimensional grand unified model, based on the orbifold S1/(Z2 ×Z ′ 2). While gauge and Higgs degrees of freedom live in the bulk, matter is located on the boundaries of the space-time. We show that proton decay is naturally suppressed or even forbidden by suitable implementations of the parity symmetries in the matter sector. The corresponding mechanism does not affect the SU(5) description of fermion masses also including neutrinos. The idea that strong and electroweak interactions may possess a common description in the framework of a grand unified theory (GUT) is very attractive. Supersymmetric GUTs, with superpartners of the ordinary particles at the TeV scale as required by the solution of the hierarchy problem, predict a successful gauge couplings unification 1 at a very large mass scale, close to the gravitational scale and possibly coinciding with it 2. Moreover, the violation of the lepton number in the vicinity of the GUT scale would provide an elegant description of the observed smallness of neutrino masses. One of the distinctive features of GUTs, the violation of baryon number (B) is also one of the necessary conditions to generate the baryon asymmetry of the universe starting from symmetric conditions. Despite their beauty, GUTs suffer from several difficulties that render rather cumbersome their specific realization in the context of conventional, four dimensional models. Perhaps the most serious problem is represented by the doublet-triplet (DT) splitting that in realistic GUTs can only be achieved at the cost of a quite complicated Higgs sector. Furthermore, minimal GUTs predict a proton lifetime that, although affected by large theoretical