Baryon number violation involving tau leptons

A bstract Baryon number violation is our most sensitive probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, especially through the study of nucleon decays. Angular momentum conservation requires a lepton in the final state of such decays, kinematically restricted to electrons, muons, or neutrinos. We show that operators involving taus, which are at first sight too heavy to play a role in nucleon decays, still lead to clean nucleon decay channels with tau neutrinos. While many of them are already constrained from existing two-body searches such as p → π + ν , other operators induce many-body decays such as p→ η π⁺ν̄τ p → ηπ + ν ¯ τ and n → K + π − ν τ that have never been searched for.