Weak Decays of Doubly Heavy Baryons: Multi-body Decay Channels

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex multi-body weak decay processes of doubly heavy baryons, providing classifications, estimated branching fractions, and decay width relations to guide future experimental studies.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of multi-body decay channels of doubly heavy baryons, including decay mode classification and SU(3) amplitude parametrization, which are novel contributions.

Findings

Estimated branching fractions for key decay channels.

Derived relations among decay widths based on SU(3) symmetry.

Identified decay modes suitable for experimental verification.

Abstract

The newly-discovered $\Xi_{cc}^{++}$ decays into the $ \Lambda_{c}^+ K^-\pi^+\pi^+$, but the experimental data has indicated that this decay is not saturated by any two-body intermediate state. In this work, we analyze the multi-body weak decays of doubly heavy baryons $\Xi_{cc}$, $\Omega_{cc}$, $\Xi_{bc}$, $\Omega_{bc}$, $\Xi_{bb}$ and $\Omega_{bb}$, in particular the three-body nonleptonic decays and four-body semileptonic decays. We classify various decay modes according to the quark-level transitions and present an estimate of the typical branching fractions for a few golden decay channels. Decay amplitudes are then parametrized in terms of a few SU(3) irreducible amplitudes. With these amplitudes, we find a number of relations for decay widths, which can be examined in future.