Baryon-Number Nonconservation and the Stability of Strange Matter

Abstract

If baryon-number nonconservation exists in the form of an effective six-quark operator which also changes strangeness by four units, it could have a tremendous impact on the absolute stability of strange quark matter. We show that such an operator is negligible in the supersymmetric standard model with ${\lambda }_{ijk}{u}_i^c{d}_j^c{d}_k^c$ terms in the superpotential, but may be of importance in models with exotic particle content. From the experimental lower limit of $10^{25}$ years on the stability of nuclei, we find a model-independent lower limit of the order $10^5$ years on the stability of strange matter against such decays.

Comments: 14 pages, LaTex, 2 figures available upon request from evan@ucrph0.ucr.edu