Relations between inclusive decay rates of heavy baryons

Abstract

The dependence of inclusive weak decay rates of heavy hadrons on the flavors of spectator light quarks is revisited with application to decays of charmed and b hyperons. It is pointed out that the differences in the semileptonic decay rates, the differences in the Cabibbo-suppressed decay rates of the charmed hyperons, and the splitting of the total decay rates of the b hyperons are all related to the differences in the lifetimes of the charmed hyperons independently of poor knowledge of hadronic matrix elements. The approximations used in these relations are the applicability of the expansion in the inverse of the charmed quark mass and the flavor SU(3) symmetry.