Effect of hadron dynamics on the proton lifetime

Abstract

A detailed, quantitative reexamination of the effect of hadron dynamics on baryon decay, modeled in terms of Skyrme-field tunneling, indicates that any hadronic suppression should be quite mild. This appears to be another illustration of the ``Cheshire-cat'' phenomenon, that variation of the apportionment between description of the nucleon as a bag of quarks and description as a Skyrme field configuration has little influence on many nucleon properties. Perhaps the largest remaining uncertainty in evaluating the decay rate has to do with the overlap between a specified quark-antiquark configuration and a final meson state.