Hadrons of Arbitrary Spin and Heavy Quark Symmetry

Abstract

We present a general construction of the spin content of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes (covariant wave functions) for heavy hadrons with arbitrary orbital excitations, using representations of the Lorentz group. These wave functions incorporate the symmetries manifest in the heavy quark limit. In the baryonic sector we clearly differentiate between the $\Lambda$ and $\Sigma$ type excited baryons. We then use the trace formalism to evaluate the weak transitions of ground state heavy hadrons to arbitrary excited heavy hadrons. The contributions of excited states to the Bjorken sum rule are also worked out in detail.

Comments: LaTex, 69 pages, IC/93/314 and MZ-TH/93-23. One of the Heavy ${\Lambda }_Q$ to first positive parity excited $\Lambda_{Q^{\prime}} decays is reformulated to account for threshold effects, with a consequent rewriting of the Bjorken sum rule for heavy baryon decays. Some typographical errors are also corrected