θ13 and proton lifetime in a minimal SO(10) ✕ S4 model of flavor.

In a recent paper, a minimal supersymmetric (SUSY) SO(10) ✕ S4 based unified model of flavor for quarks and leptons was proposed with two 10 and one 126 contributing to fermion masses. An important aspect of this model is that Yukawa couplings emerge dynamically from minimization of the flavon potential, thereby reducing the number of parameters considerably. We make a detailed numerical analysis of this model for fermion mixings including SUSY threshold effects at the TeV scale and type-I corrections to a type-II dominant seesaw for neutrino masses. This is a single-step breaking model with SUSY SO(10) broken at the grand unified theory scale of 2 ✕ 1016 GeV to the minimal super-symmetric standard model. The minimal model has only 11 parameters, and therefore, the charged fermion fits predict the masses (up to an overall scale) and mixings in the neutrino sector. We present correlations for me different predictions in the neutrino mixing parameters. The recent experimental "large" θ13 value of ~9° can be obtained by a simple extension of die minimal model. We also find that proton decay mode p → K+ ¯vμ has a partial lifetime of ~ 1034 yrs, which is within reach of die next round of planned proton decay searches. The successful fit for fermion masses requires the Higgs mass to be below 129 GeV in this model. If die Higgs mass lies between 120 and 128 GeV, as suggested by the recent LHC data, we find a lower limit on the light stop mass of 755 (211) GeV for μ ﹥ 0(﹤0). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]