# Probability of forming mesons vs baryons

When a heavy quark hadronizes it has some probability of forming a meson vs forming a baryon. I suspect there is a well known branching ratio for each type of hadron. Does anyone know what the probability is or, even better, a reference that discusses this? An ideal answer (though not necessary) would further give a crude approximation of this probability (though I don't know if this is even possible).

• Isn't this something people studying jet physics at colliders do? – suresh Feb 11 '14 at 14:57
• When running Monte Carlo simulations in colliders, people studying jet physics run programs like Pythia and Herwig that calculate such probabilities for any initial conditions. I would think that in the limit that the mass of heavy quark goes to infinity the answer should be quite simple, though I don't know how to find it. – JeffDror Feb 11 '14 at 15:38
• The answer can't be simple as one needs a lot of inputs (decay rates, form factors, etc.) to carry out the computation. I think the papers of Field and Feynman (FF) from the late 70's on hadronization of quarks might be a good starting point. See here arxiv.org/abs/0809.0281 to get an idea on more modern literature as well as the reference to the FF papers. – suresh Feb 12 '14 at 0:20
• Thanks for the reference. I will look into it. However, the reason I believe the result should be simple is because in the heavy quark limit, the quark acts as a single color source. This tends to simplify many calculations using heavy quark effective theory, though I don't understand the details. I do of course need to assume that the quark has a large enough lifetime such that hadronization has enough time to occur. – JeffDror Feb 12 '14 at 3:41
• Let me know if and when you find some answers. – suresh Feb 12 '14 at 5:23