Doubly Charmful Baryonic B Decays

Abstract

There are two apparent puzzles connected with the two-body and three-body doubly charmed baryonic B decays. First, earlier calculations based on QCD sum rules or the diquark model predict $Br(\bar B^0\to\Xi_c^+\bar\Lambda_c^-)\approx Br(\bar B^0\to\B_c\bar N)$, while experimentally the former has a rate two orders of magnitude larger than the latter. Second, a naive estimate of the branching ratio $10^{-9}$ for the color-suppressed three-body decay $\bar B\to\Lambda_c^+\bar\Lambda_c^-K$, which is highly suppressed by phase space, is too small by five to six orders of magnitude compared to experiment. We show that the great suppression for the $\Lambda_c^+\bar\Lambda_c^-K$ production can be alleviated provided that there exists a narrow hidden charm bound state with a mass near the $\Lambda_c\bar\Lambda_c$ threshold. This new state that couples strongly to the charmed baryon pair can be searched for in B decays and in $p\bar p$ collisions by studying the mass spectrum of $D^{(*)}\bar D^{(*)}$ or $\Lambda_c\bar\Lambda_c$. The doubly charmful decay $\bar B\to\Xi_c\bar\Lambda_c$ has a configuration more favorable than the singly charmful one such as $\bar B^0\to\Lambda_c\bar p$ since no hard gluon is needed to produce the energetic $\Xi_c\bar\Lambda_c$ pair in the former decay, while two hard gluons are needed for the latter process. Assuming that a soft $q\bar q$ quark pair is produced through the $\sigma$ and $\pi$ meson exchanges in the configuration for $\bar B\to \Xi_c\bar\Lambda_c$, it is found that its branching ratio is of order $10^{-3}$, in agreement with experiment.