Partial waves of baryon-antibaryon in three-body B meson decay

Abstract

The conspicuous threshold enhancement has been observed in the baryon-antibaryon subchannels of many three-body B decay modes. By examining the partial waves of baryon-antibaryon, we first show for B- -->pp-bar K- that the pK- angular correlation rules out dominance of a single pp-bar partial wave for the enhancement, for instance, the resonance hypothesis or the strong final-state interaction in a single channel. The measured pK- angular correlation turns out to be opposite to the naive expectation of the short-distance picture. We study the origin of this reversed angular correlation in the context of the pp-bar partial waves and argue that NN-bar bound states may be the cause of this sign reversal. Dependence of the angular correlation on the pp-bar invariant mass is very important to probe the underlying problem from the experimental side.