English

Nucleon decays into three leptons: Noncontact contributions

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-04-13 v2

Abstract

We investigate baryon number violating (BNV) nucleon decays into three leptons from noncontact contributions that are induced by dimension-6 (dim-6) BNV operators in low-energy effective field theory (LEFT) with an exchange of a baryon, meson, lepton, or photon field. We systematically classify all these processes that change lepton flavor by one unit and formulate their decay widths in terms of the dim-6 LEFT Wilson coefficients. By applying constraints on these Wilson coefficients derived from current experimental limits on BNV two-body nucleon decays, we obtain stringent bounds on the rates of these triple-lepton modes. These bounds vary significantly from one dim-6 operator to another under consideration. Our results for the Δ(BL)=0\Delta(B-L)=0 modes differ by several orders of magnitude from previous phase-space estimates in the literature, thereby providing a more reliable assessment of their potential occurrence. In addition, we provide improved bounds on Δ(B+L)=0\Delta(B+L)=0 modes compared to the existing experimental limits.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.02692,
  title  = {Nucleon decays into three leptons: Noncontact contributions},
  author = {Jing Chen and Yi Liao and Xiao-Dong Ma and Hao-Lin Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.02692},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages, minor revisions to match the published version in PLB

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:05:34.325Z