NATURAL SUPPRESSION OF d = 5 OPERATOR INDUCED PROTON DECAY IN SUPERSYMMETRIC GRAND UNIFIED THEORIES

The proton decay in supersymmetric (SUSY) Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), where the special mechanism provides the natural suppression of the dimension 5 (d = 5) operators, was studied. Due to this mechanism, d = 5 operator induced proton decay takes place only through the mixing of light generation fermions with those from third generation and crucially depends on the structure of fermion mass matrices. We show that in general proton decay is strongly suppressed relative to the standard SUSY GUT situation and for wide class of fermion mass matrices the SUSY parameter space practically has no restrictions.