Inclusive Charmed-Baryon Decays and Lifetimes

We have quantitatively reanalyzed the inclusive charmed-baryon decays. New ingredients are the Voloshin preasymptotic effects in semileptonic decays and the Cabibbo-subleading contributions to both semileptonic and nonleptonic decays. It has been found that the Cabbibo-subleading Voloshin contribution essentially improves the theoretical semileptonic branching ratio of $\Lambda_c^{+}$, in agreement with experiment. The semileptonic branching ratios for $\Xi_c^{+}$ and $\Omega_c^{0}$ are found to be large, i.e., of the order of 20%. The lifetimes hierarchy is in a good qualitative and even quantitative agreement with experiment except for the $\Xi_c^{+}$ lifetime, which is somewhat smaller than the experimental value. Future measurements, especially measurements of the semileptonic branching ratios for $\Omega_c^{0}$, $\Xi_c^{+}$ and $\Xi_c^{0}$ should be decisive for the check of this approach.Comment: 13 pages, Latex, 3 figures included, shortened version, to appear in Z.Phys.

Preasymptotic effects in beauty decays

Large preasymptotic effects in beauty decays have been found using heavy-quark and SU(3) symmetry, as well as experimental data on charmed hyperons. Contrary to rather uniform beauty-meson lifetimes, a much larger spread of beauty-baryon lifetimes is predicted. However, it is highly unlikely that, theoretically, the $\tau(\Lambda_b)/\tau(B_d^0)$ ratio, which at present deviates more than $1\sigma$ from the experimental result, can be lowered below 0.9.Comment: 6 pages, talk given by B. Melic at The 3rd International Conference on B Physics and CP Violation, Taipei, Taiwan, December 3-7, 1999, to appear in the Proceedings, two figures adde

Inclusive decays and lifetimes of doubly charmed baryons

The analysis of singly charmed hadrons has been extended to the case of doubly charmed baryons, $\Xi_{cc}^{++}$, $\Xi_{cc}^{+}$ and $\Omega_{cc}^{+}$. Doubly charmed baryons are described as a system containing a heavy $cc$-diquark and a light quark, similarly as in a heavy-light meson. This leads to preasymptotic effects in semileptonic and nonleptonic decays which are essentially proportional to the meson wave function. Interplay between preasymptotic effects in semileptonic and/or nonleptonic decay rates leads to very clear predictions for semileptonic branching ratios and lifetimes of doubly charmed baryons.Comment: 14 pages latex file, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Nucleon strangeness as the response to a strangeness-sensitive probe in a class of hadron models

On top of its valence quarks, the full nucleon ground state may contain appreciable admixture of s-\bar{s} pairs already at small momentum transfers. This paper discusses strangeness in the mean-field type of nucleon models, and exemplifies this by explicit calculations in the MIT bag model enriched by the presence of instantons. We calculate the instanton contribution to the strangeness in the MIT bag (on top of the standard contribution to strangeness found in that model). Although we do it in an essentially perturbative way, we present a detailed derivation of the formula expressing nucleon matrix elements of bilinear strange quark operators, in terms of a model valence nucleon state and interactions producing quark-antiquark fluctuations on top of that valence state. We do it in detail to clarify our argument that in the context of the mean-field type of quark models (where a Fock state expansion exists and where the nucleon state can be constructed out of single-quark states), the resulting formula acquires a significance beyond perturbation theory.The derivation combines the usage of the evolution operator containing a strangeness source, and Feynman-Hellmann theorem.Comment: LaTeX2e, 34 pages, 4 figures (included