Excited State Contributions to the Heavy Baryon Fragmentation Functions in a Quark-Diquark Model

Abstract

Spin dependent fragmentation functions for heavy flavor quarks to fragment into heavy baryons are calculated in a quark-diquark model. The production of intermediate spin 1/2 and 3/2 excited states is explicity included. The resulting ${\Lambda }_b$ production rate and polarization at LEP energies are in agreement with experiment. The ${\Lambda }_c$ and ${\Xi }_c$ functions are also obtained. The spin independent $f_1(z)$ is compared to data. The integrated values for production rates agree with the data.

Comments: LaTeX2e 27 pages with 9 PostScript figures