B meson decays to baryons in the diquark model

We study B meson decays to two charmless baryons in the diquark model, including strong and electroweak penguins as well as the tree operators. It is shown that penguin operators can enhance considerably, but affect only slightly, where and are non-strange and strange baryons, respectively. The dependence of the decay rates due to tree–penguin interference is illustrated. In principle, some of the modes could dominate over for , but in general the effect is milder than their mesonic counterparts. This is because the operator can only produce vector but not scalar diquarks, while the opposite is true for and . Predictions from the diquark model are compared to those from the sum rule calculation. The decays and inclusive baryonic decays are also discussed. Received: 27 December 2001 / Published online: 5 April 2002