Charmed and Bottom Baryons: a Variational Approach based on Heavy Quark Symmetry

We evaluate masses of bottom and charmed baryons by using several non-relativistic quark models, adjusted to the light and heavy--light meson spectra. Heavy Quark Symmetry leads to important simplifications of the three body problem, which turns out to be easily solved by a simple variational ansatz. Wave functions, parameterized in a simple manner, are also given and thus they can be easily used to compute further observables. Our simple scheme reproduces previous results (baryon masses, charge and mass radii, charge form factors $...$) obtained by solving the Faddeev equations with simple potentials, and it has been also used to find, for the very first time, the predictions for strangeness-less baryons of the SU(2) chirally inspired quark-quark interactions. We compare these results with those obtained from phenomenological potentials and find that the one pion exchange term of the chirally inspired interactions leads to relative changes of the $\Lambda_b$ and $\Lambda_c$ binding energies as large as 90%.