Low-scale quantum gravity and double nucleon decay

In models with a low quantum gravity scale, one might expect sizable effects from nonrenormalizable interactions that violate the global symmetries of the standard model. While some mechanism must be invoked in such theories to suppress higher-dimension operators that contribute to proton decay, operators that change baryon number by two units are less dangerous and may be present at phenomenologically interesting levels. Here we focus on ΔB=2 operators that also change strangeness. We demonstrate how to compute explicitly a typical nucleon–nucleon decay amplitude, assuming a nonvanishing six-quark cluster probability and MIT bag model wave functions. We then use our results to estimate the rate for other possible modes. We find that such baryon-number-violating decays may be experimentally accessible if the operators in question are present and the Planck scale is less than ∼400 TeV.