Hyperfine Mixing and the Semileptonic Decays of Double-Heavy Baryons in a Quark Model

Abstract

The semileptonic decays of the lowest-lying double-heavy baryons is treated in a quark model. For the $\Xi_{bb}$, hyperfine mixing in the spin wave function leaves the total rate for decay into the lowest lying daughter baryons essentially unchanged, but changes the relative rates into the $\Xi_{bc}$ and $\Xi_{bc}^\prime$. The same pattern is obtained in the decays of the $\Omega_{bb}$. For the $\Xi_{bc}$, this mixing leads to factor of about 17 suppression in the decay rate to the $\Xi_{cc}^*$, and a factor of two suppression in the total decay rate. For the $\Omega_{bc}$, the decay to the $\Omega_{cc}^*$ is suppressed by a factor of more than 30 from the unmixed case, and the total decay rate is decreased to about 40% of the decay rate obtained when mixing is ignored.