Abstract
The decay has recently been observed by the LHCb Collaboration at CERN. In contrast to most weak decays of -flavored baryons, this process involves the decay of the strange quark in and thus has features in common with nonleptonic weak decays of hyperons. Thanks to the expected pure S-wave nature of the decay in question in the heavy quark limit, we find that its amplitude may be related to those for S-wave nonleptonic decays of , , and in a picture inspired by duality. The calculated branching fraction is consistent with the range allowed in the LHCb analysis. The error is dominated by an assumed 30% uncertainty in the amplitude due to possible U(3) violation. A more optimistic view based on sum rules involving nonleptonic hyperon decay S-wave amplitudes reduces the error on the branching fraction to .
- Received 4 January 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.034020
© 2016 American Physical Society