EXCLUSIVE NONLEPTONIC CHARM BARYON DECAYS

We present a spectator quark model calculation of the Cabibbo-enhanced non-leptonic decays of the lowest lying charm baryons LAMBDA(c), XI(c) and OMEGA(c) decaying into non-charm ground state baryons and mesons.We employ covariant quark model wave functions to describe the ground state baryons and mesons. They are obtained by boosting rest frame wave functions to equal velocity frames. The non-leptonic decay amplitudes are then obtained in terms of two wave function overlap parameters which we fit to the experimental data. We discuss general features of the flavour and helicity composition of the final states in the quark model approach. We emphasize that W-exchange contributions are of crucial importance for the description of non-leptonic charm baryon decay data. We calculate rates and polarization asymmetry parameters and compare them to existing data as well as to soft-meson plus current algebra calculations.