Charmed and Bottom Baryons: a Variational Approach based on Heavy Quark Symmetry

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 Lambda(b) and Lambda(C) binding energies as large as 90%