Strangeness as Geometric Anchor: Phase-Space-Corrected Decay Widths in the Baryon Decuplet

In a companion study to our analysis of vector meson decay scaling, we examine whether baryon strong decays exhibit analogous "geometric permeability" patterns. Focusing on the spin-3/2 decuplet ground states (Δ, Σ*, Ξ*), we construct a matched comparison using the two-body strong decays to octet baryon + pion. After correcting for the leading P-wave centrifugal barrier (Γ ∝ p³), we define a phase-space-corrected permeability η* ≡ Γᵢ/(m·p³) and find a robust, monotonic suppression with increasing strangeness: η* decreases from 8.1 ± 0.3 (Δ) to 2.6 ± 0.1 (Σ*) to 1.8 ± 0.1 (Ξ*). The uncertainty bands do not overlap, indicating that this ~4× residual suppression persists after removal of the leading phase-space and centrifugal-barrier effects. We interpret this as evidence that strange quark content reduces the effective strong-decay coupling, consistent with a "geometric stiffening" in which the strange quark acts as an effective topological anchor that suppresses decay permeability. This strangeness-dependent residual complements our earlier finding of mass-dependent spectral filtering in mesons and suggests that hadron decay rates encode geometric information beyond simple kinematics.