Production of pentaquarks with hidden charm and double strangeness in $\Xi_b$ and $\Omega_b$ decays

Abstract

Recently, several pentaquark states $P_{css}$, with global flavor $\bar c c s s n$, have been predicted within a theoretical framework based on unitary coupled channels. We study theoretically the feasibility to observe the $P_{css}$ with $I(J^P)=\frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{2}^-)$ in the decays $\Xi_b^0\to \eta \eta_c \Xi^0$ and $\Omega_b^-\to K^- \eta_c \Xi^0$. Indeed, within the model, the $\eta_c \Xi^0$ channel is the lowest mass pseudoscalar-baryon channel to which this pentaquark state couples, thus we can expect to observe its signal in the $\eta_c \Xi^0$ invariant mass distribution of the mentioned decays. We identify the dominant weak decay processes and then implement the hadronization into the different meson-baryon channels in the final state, linked by flavor symmetry. The dominant meson-baryon final state interaction is then implemented to generate the full amplitude, implicitly accounting for the dynamical emergence of the pentaquark states. We obtain a clear Breit-Wigner-like resonant signal in the spectrum of the $\Omega_b^-$ decay, exceeding that in the $\Xi_b^0$ decay by two to three orders of magnitude. In the case of the latter decay, the resonant state would manifest as a significant dip in the spectrum. We study the feasibility of searching for these $b$-hadron decay modes and analysing their resonant components using the current and future data samples from the LHCb experiment.