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

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.