NATURAL SUPPRESSION OF HIGGSINO-MEDIATED PROTON DECAY IN SUPERSYMMETRIC SO(10)

In supersymmetric grand unified theories, proton decay mediated by the color-triplet Higgsino is generally problematic and requires some fine-tuning of parameters. We present a mechanism which naturally suppresses such dimension-5 operators in the context of SUSY SO(10). The mechanism, which implements natural doublet-triplet splitting using the adjoint Higgs boson, converts these dimension-5 operators effectively into dimension 6. By explicitly computing the Higgs spectrum and the resulting threshold uncertainties we show that the successful prediction of sin(2) theta(W) is maintained as a prediction in this scheme. It is argued that only a weak suppression of the Higgsino-mediated proton decay is achievable within SUSY SU(5) without fine-tuning, in contrast to a strong suppression in SUSY SO(10).