Observation of a rare beta decay of the charmed baryon with a Graph Neural Network

Abstract

The beta decay of the lightest charmed baryon $\Lambda_c^+$ provides unique insights into the fundamental mechanism of strong and electro-weak interactions, serving as a testbed for investigating non-perturbative quantum chromodynamics and constraining the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix parameters. This article presents the first observation of the Cabibbo-suppressed decay $\Lambda_c^+ \rightarrow n e^+ \nu_{e}$, utilizing $4.5~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of electron-positron annihilation data collected with the BESIII detector. A novel Graph Neural Network based technique effectively separates signals from dominant backgrounds, notably $\Lambda_c^+ \rightarrow \Lambda e^+ \nu_{e}$, achieving a statistical significance exceeding $10\sigma$. The absolute branching fraction is measured to be $(3.57\pm0.34_{\mathrm{stat.}}\pm0.14_{\mathrm{syst.}})\times 10^{-3}$. For the first time, the CKM matrix element $\left|V_{cd}\right|$ is extracted via a charmed baryon decay as $0.208\pm0.011_{\rm exp.}\pm0.007_{\rm LQCD}\pm0.001_{\tau_{\Lambda_c^+}}$. This work highlights a new approach to further understand fundamental interactions in the charmed baryon sector, and showcases the power of modern machine learning techniques in experimental high-energy physics.