Charmed and bottom baryons: a variational approach based on heavy quark symmetry Original Research Article

The use of heavy quark symmetry to study bottom and charmed baryons leads to important simplifications of the non-relativistic three body problem, which turns out to be easily solved by a simple variational ansatz. Our simple scheme reproduces previous results (baryon masses, charge and mass radii, …) obtained by solving the Faddeev equations with simple non-relativistic quark–quark potentials, adjusted to the light and heavy–light meson spectra. Wave functions, parameterized in a simple manner, are also given and thus they can be easily used to compute further observables. Our method has been also used to find the predictions for strangeness-less baryons of the SU(2) chirally inspired quark–quark interactions. We find that the one pion exchange term of the chirally inspired interactions leads to relative changes of the Λb and Λc binding energies as large as 90%.