Proton decay and flavor violating thresholds in SO(10) models

Discovery of neutrino mass has put the spotlight on the supersymmetric (SUSY) SO(10) model as a natural candidate for grand unification of forces and matter. However, the suppression of proton decay is a major problem in such SUSY grand unified models. In this Letter we show how to alleviate this problem by simple threshold effects which raise the colored Higgsino masses and the grand unification scale to greater than or similar to 10(17) GeV. There exist only four types of fields arising from different SO(10) representations which can generate this kind of threshold effect. Some of these fields also generate a sizable flavor violation in the quark sector compared to the lepton sector. The b-tau unification can work in these types of models even for intermediate values of tanbeta.