Flavour Structure of GUTs and Uncertainties in Proton Lifetime Estimates

We study the flavour aspects of proton lifetime estimates in simple Grand unified models paying particular attention to their inherent fragility due to the notorious lack of control of some of the key parameters governing the relevant hard-process amplitudes. Among these, the theoretical uncertainties in the flavour structure of the baryon and lepton number violating charged currents due to the potential higher-order effects afflicting the matching of the underlying Yukawa couplings to the low-energy data often play a prominent role. Focusing on the minimal variants of the most popular unified models we study the potential instabilities of the corresponding proton lifetime estimates based on the renormalizable-level Yukawa fits with respect to the Planck-scale induced flavour effects. In particular, we perform a detailed numerical analysis of all minimal $SO(10)$ Yukawa sector fits available in the literature and show that the proton lifetime estimates based on these inputs exhibit a high degree of robustness with respect to moderate-size perturbations, well within the expected "improvement window" of the upcoming proton decay searches.