Minimal So(10) Grand Unification: Predictions for Proton Decay and Neutrino Masses and Mixings

Prospects for SO(10) as a minimal grand unification group have recently been heightened by several considerations such as the MSW resolution of the solar neutrino puzzle, baryogenesis, possibility for understanding fermion masses etc. I review the present status of the minimal SO(10) models with special emphasis on the predictions for proton lifetime and predictions for neutrino masses for the non-supersymmetric case and discuss some preliminary results for the supersymmetric case. It was generally believed that minimal SO(10) models predict wrong mass relations between the charged fermions of the first and second generations; furthermore, while the smallness of the neutrino masses in these models arises from the see-saw mechanism, it used to be thought that detailed predictions for neutrino masses and mixings require further adhoc assumptions. In this talk, I report some recent work with K.S.Babu, where we discovered that the minimal SO(10) model, both with and without SUSY, has in it a built-in mechanism that not only corrects the bad mass relations between the charged fermions but at the same time allows a complete prediction for the masses and mixings in the neutrino sector. We define our minimal model as the one that consists of the smallest set of Higgs multiplets that are needed for gauge symmetry breaking. Our result is based on the hypothesis that the complex 10 of Higgs bosons has only a single coupling to the fermions. This hypothesis is guaranteed in supersymmetric models and in non-SUSY models that obey a softly broken Peccei-Quinn symmetry.