HEAVY DIQUARK SYMMETRY CONSTRAINTS FOR STRONG DECAYS

Abstract

The heavy diquark symmetry (HDS) of doubly heavy baryons (DHBs) provides new insights into the spectroscopy of these hadrons. We derive the consequences of this symmetry for the mass spectra and the decay widths of DHBs. We compare these symmetry constraints to results from a nonrelativistic quark model for the mass spectra and results from the 3P0 model for strong decays. The quark model we implement was not constructed with these symmetries and contains interactions which explicitly break HDS. Nevertheless these symmetries emerge. We argue that the 3P0 model and any other model for strong transitions which employs a spectator assumption explicitly respects HDS. We also explore the possibility of treating the strange quark as a heavy quark and apply these ideas to Ξ, Ξc and Ξb baryons.