Proton decay: The Missing Piece of Grand Unification & The Need for a Large Underground Detector

The idea of grand unification proposes that the the fundamental constituents of matter - quarks and leptons - possess an underlying unity, as also the three fundamental forces: strong nuclear, electromagnetic and weak radioactive. This idea has had impressive empirical success including the observed meeting of the strengths of the three forces at an energy scale of about 2x 10^16 GeV, and neutrino mass scales just as theoretically expected. Proton decay remains as the notable missing piece of this idea of grand unification. The status of theoretical expectations as also present experimental searches will be presented. The need for a large underground detector coupled to a long baseline neutrino beam in searching sensitively for proton decay, neutrino oscillations and supernova neutrinos will be noted.

About the Speaker : Professor Jogesh C. Pati has made immense and everlasting contributions to theoretical particle physics.  He is best known for his pioneering work towards the notion of a unification of fundamental particles - quarks and leptons - and of their three gauge forces: weak, electromagnetic and strong.  His formulation, carried out in collaboration with the Nobel laureate Prof. Abdus Salam, of the original gauge theory of quark-lepton unification, and their resulting insight that such a unification would lead to violations of baryon and lepton numbers, resulting in proton decay, provide the corner stones of modern particle physics today.  For his "Pioneering Contributions Towards a Quest for Unification", he received the prestigious International Dirac Medal for the year 2000 (with Howard Georgi and Helen Quinn).  He was recently awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2013 by the Government of India.