Speaker
Description
Charmed mesons and baryons provide an ideal laboratory to probe non-perturbative strong interaction dynamics. The LHCb experiment, with its excellent vertexing, tracking and particle identification capabilities, is very suitable for the study of charmed mesons and baryons, and interesting results in this area have been obtained from several recent analyses of LHCb data. Following the discovery of the doubly charmed baryon $\Xi_{cc}^{++}$ via its decay to $\Lambda_c^+ K^- \pi^+ \pi^+$, this state has now also been confirmed through its decay to the final state $\Xi_c^+ \pi^+$. In addition, the $\Xi_{cc}^{++}$ lifetime has been measured for the first time and found to be $\tau(\Xi_{cc}^{++}) = 256^{+24}_{-22}$ (stat) $\pm 14$ (syst) fs, which firmly establishes that the $\Xi_{cc}^{++}$ baryon decays weakly. In a third analysis, the $\Omega_c0$ lifetime is measured to be $268 \pm 24$ fs, which is approximately four times larger than, and inconsistent with, the current world average, $69 \pm 12$ fs. Quarkonia production in various collision systems (pp, proton-ion, ion-ion and fixed target mode) will also be presented, including central exclusive production where the colliding particles remain intact.
