Proton decay in a nucleus: nonrelativistic treatment of nuclear effects

Abstract

In this paper, proton decay in a large nucleus is studied in the framework of SU(5) grand unification theory (GUT). By using a method based upon the Green s-function technique of many-body physics, nuclear effects on spectator and pole terms are computed. The decay width in the nucleus is found to be practically the same as in free space. However, nuclear effects are of considerable importance concerning the positron spectrum. A densitycorrelation expansion is introduced which is useful for carrying out a systematic study of nuclear effects in proton decay in a large nucleus. The method presented here can be easily extended to other GUT's or supersymmetric GUT's.