Abstract. I overview the theoretical status and recent progress on the calculations of beauty baryon decays focusing on the QCD aspects of the exclusive semi-leptonic Λ b → p ℓν decay at large recoil and theoretical challenges of radiative and electro-weak penguin decays
IntroductionInvestigating beauty baryon decays has been initiated in the early days of the heavy-quark effective theory (HQET) for the purpose of understanding the general properties of heavy-quark expansion, determining the CKM matrix elements and shedding light on physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). In contrast to the B-meson decays, the helicity structure of the weak effective Hamiltonian can be extracted uniquely in bottom baryon decays with the aid of the baryon polarization asymmetry. On the theoretical side, QCD dynamics of a certain beauty baryon (i.e., Λ b ) is even simpler than that of B-mesons in the heavy quark limit. It is therefore natural to anticipate that beauty baryon decays will be helpful to sharpen our knowledge of the origin of CP violation and of the strong interaction dynamics, in particular taking into account the fact that no evident BSM signals have been detected yet in the intensive studies of B-meson decays.The aim of this brief review is to report the current status of theoretical calculations for weak form factors of the semi-leptonic Λ b → pℓν decay, and to elaborate the primary challenges of factorizing the QCD dynamics for radiative and electro-weak penguin Λ b → Λ γ, Λ ℓ + ℓ − decays.