Speaker
Description
$B$ mesons are the lightest mesons which can decay to various final states containing different baryons. Up to now, the discrepancy between the inclusive branching fraction of all $B$ meson decay modes with at least a couple of baryons in the final state, measured by ARGUS to be $(6.8 \pm 0.6)\%$ , and the sum of exclusive baryonic channels, averaged on neutral and charged $B$ mesons at less than $1\%$, represents an open issue. The measurement and comparison of exclusive branching fractions of baryonic $B$ decays, as well as studies on the dynamic of the decay, may allow better understanding of baryon production in $B$ decays and, more generally, hadron fragmentation into baryons. We present here a search for the decay $B \to p \bar{p} p \bar{p}$, not yet observed, by using a data set consisting of about 470 million $B-\bar{B}$ pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. We select $11.1 \pm 4.6$ candidate events, corresponding to a signal significance of $2.9\sigma$, and obtain
the branching fraction of $(1.14\pm0.047(stat)\pm0.17(syst))\times10^{-7}$.
