"Proton decays into a positron and neutral pion, p → e+π0, are a dominant decay mode in many GUT models. It also has a very clean experimental signature in a water Cherenkov detector with full reconstruction of the event. After decades of search, the sensitivity is still improving with advancement of detector technology and analysis technique. One of examples for such a technique is the background suppression with the neutron tagging. In the proton decay events, the probability of neutron emission is rather small, while in the atmospheric neutrino events, which is the dominant background of proton decay searches, often neutrons are produced. Thus, neutron tagging can provide an additional handle to suppress the background for the proton decay search and improve the sensitivity."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Proton_decay