We study the proton lifetime in the $SO(10)$ Grand Unified Theory (GUT), which has the left-right (LR) symmetric gauge theory below the GUT scale. In particular, we focus on the minimal model without the bi-doublet Higgs field in the LR symmetric mod
el, which predicts the LR-breaking scale at around $10^{10text{--}12}$ GeV. The Wilson coefficients of the proton decay operators turn out to be considerably larger than those in the minimal $SU(5)$ GUT model especially when the Standard Model Yukawa interactions are generated by integrating out extra vector-like multiplets. As a result, we find that the proton lifetime can be within the reach of the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment even when the GUT gauge boson mass is in the $10^{16text{--}17}$ GeV range. We also show that the mass of the extra vector-like multiplets can be generated by the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking in a consistent way with the axion dark matter scenario.
We propose a model with $A_4$ flavor symmetry for leptons and quarks in the framework of supersymmetric SU(5) grand unified theory (GUT). The running masses of quarks and charged leptons at GUT scale ($sim 10^{16}$ GeV) are realized by the adjoint 24
-dimensional Higgs multiplet and additional gauge singlet scalar fields including flavons. In this paper, we focus on a result of the quark and charged lepton masses and quark mixing since our present model is known to reproduce recent experimental results of the neutrino mass and oscillation. Those results are showed numerically.
Flavor symmetries are useful to realize fermion flavor structures in the standard model. In particular, discrete $A_4$ symmetry is used to realize lepton flavor structures, and some scalars which are called flavon are introduced to break this symmetr
y. In many models, flavons are assumed to be much heavier than the electroweak scale. However, our previous work showed that flavon mass around 100 GeV is allowed by experimental constraints in the $A_4$ symmetric model with residual $Z_3$ symmetry. In this paper, we discuss collider search of such a light flavon $varphi_T$. We find that an electron - photon collision, as a considerable option at the international linear collider, has advantages to search for the signals. At the electron - photon collider flavons are produced as $e^-gamma to l^- varphi_T$ and decay into two charged leptons. Then we analyze signals of flavor-conserving final-state $tau^+ tau^- e^-$, and flavor-violating final-states $tau^+ mu^- mu^-$ and $mu^+ tau^- tau^-$ by carrying out numerical simulation. For the former final-state, SM background can be strongly suppressed by imposing cuts on the invariant masses of final-state leptons. For the later final-states, SM background is extremely small, because in the SM there are no such flavor-violating final-states. We then find that sufficient discovery significance can be obtained, even if flavons are heavier than the lower limits from flavor physics.
