Abstract
A general analysis is made of the question of whether the proton-decay operators coming from the exchange of colored Higgsinos can be completely eliminated in a natural way in supersymmetric (SUSY) grand unified models. It is shown that they can indeed be in SO(10) while at the same time naturally solving the doublet-triplet splitting problem, having only two light Higgs doublets, and using no more than a single adjoint Higgs field. Accomplishing all of this requires that the vacuum expectation value of the adjoint Higgs field be proportional to the generator rather than to as is usually assumed. It is shown that such models can give realistic quark and lepton masses. We also point out a new mechanism for solving the μ problem in the context of SO(10) SUSY grand unified theories.
- Received 3 February 2002
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.65.095009
©2002 American Physical Society