Weak decays of doubly heavy baryons: the $1/2\to3/2$ case

TL;DR

This paper studies the weak decay processes of doubly heavy baryons into spin-3/2 baryons using the light-front approach, providing detailed form factors, decay widths, and symmetry breaking effects relevant for experimental detection.

Contribution

It extends previous research by analyzing 1/2 to 3/2 decay modes, calculating form factors and decay widths, and exploring SU(3) symmetry breaking effects in these processes.

Findings

Branching fractions for 1/2 to 3/2 transitions are about ten times smaller than 1/2 to 1/2 transitions.

Sizable SU(3) symmetry breaking effects are observed in charm sector semi-leptonic decays.

Parametric uncertainties in decay calculations are thoroughly examined.

Abstract

As a continuation of our previous works, we investigate the weak decays of doubly heavy baryons into a spin-$3/2$ singly or doubly heavy baryon. Light-front approach is adopted to handle the dynamics in the transitions, in which the two spectator quarks are approximated as a diquark. Results for form factors are then used to calculate decay widths of semi-leptonic and nonleptonic processes. The flavor SU(3) symmetry and symmetry breaking effects in semi-leptonic decays modes are explored, and we point out that in charm sector, there are sizable symmetry breaking effects. For nonleptonic decay modes, we study only the factorizable channels induced by the external W-emission. We find that branching fractions for most 1/2 to 3/2 transitions are approximately one order of magnitude smaller than the corresponding ones for the 1/2 to 1/2 transitions. Parametric uncertainties are also investigated in detail. This work, together with our previous works, are beneficial to the experimental studies of doubly heavy baryons at LHC and other experiments.