Full Analysis of CP Violation Induced by the Decay Angular Correlations in Four-Body Cascade Decays of Heavy Hadrons

Abstract The violation of the charge-parity (CP) transformation symmetry, which has been observed in numerous pure meson decay processes, was only confirmed very recently by the LHCb collaboration in the four-body decay of the heavy baryon Λ b 0 , Λ b 0 → pK − π + π − , through a comparison of the decay branching ratio with that of the CP-conjugate process. However, the detailed dynamics behind this CP asymmetry is obviously far from clear. We propose a formalism for the full analysis of the decay angular correlations in four-body cascade decays of heavy hadrons which can provide more information about the CP violation in these decays. To illustrate this, we apply the decay angular correlation analysis of CP violation to another four-body decay channel that involves baryons, B 0 → p p K + π − , which has also been investigated by the LHCb collaboration with no evidence of CP violation being found. Surprisingly, based on a simple assumption on the statistical errors, and with the event yield extracted inversely from the published data of LHCb, we obtain non-zero CP asymmetries of about 10% corresponding to the decay angular correlations, which are considerably larger than the CP asymmetries observed in the Λ b 0 → pK − π + π − channel. We recommend that experimental collaborations conduct comprehensive decay angular correlation analyses of CP violation in four-body decays of heavy hadrons, including the two channels discussed above.