Final state interactions in nonleptonic hyperon decays

Abstract

We investigate the importance of final state interactions in weak nonleptonic hyperon decays within a relativistic chiral unitary approach based on coupled channels. The effective potentials for meson-baryon scattering are derived from a chiral effective Lagrangian and iterated in a Bethe-Salpeter equation, which generates the low lying baryon resonances dynamically. The inclusion of final state interactions decreases the discrepancy between theory and experiment for both s and p waves. Our study indicates that contributions from higher order terms of the weak effective Lagrangian may play an important role in these decays.