Excited state contributions to the heavy baryon fragmentation functions in a quark-diquark model

Abstract

Spin dependent fragmentation functions for heavy flavor quarks to fragment into heavy baryons are calculated in a quark-diquark model. The production of intermediate spin 1/2 and 3/2 excited states is explicitly included. The resulting ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{b}$ production rate and polarization at CERN LEP energies are in agreement with experiment. The ${\ensuremath{\Lambda}}_{c}$ and ${\ensuremath{\Xi}}_{c}$ functions are also obtained. The spin independent ${f}_{1}(z)$ is compared to data. The integrated values for production rates agree with the data.