1. Introduction
One of the challenging question in particle physics, how quarks and gluons form hadrons, has not been understood in experimental or theoretical points of view. However, the electromagnetic form factors (FFs), which are used to parameterize the internal electromagnetic structure of hadrons, have been studied since 1960s [
1]. The nucleon, including the proton and neutron, which are the most abundant building blocks of the Universe, has been studied both in the space-like and time-like domains. Nowadays, the unprecedented data with larger statistics collected at electron–positron collision facilities brings the access to strange and charm hyperon structure [
2]. Under the hypothesis that the one-photon exchange process dominates the production of spin-1/2 baryon
B, the differential cross section of the time-like process
is expressed in terms of electromagnetic FFs [
3]:
where
is the fine-structure constant and
s the square of the center-of-mass (c.m.) energy. The polar angle and velocity of the out-going baryon in the c.m. frame are denoted by
and
=
, respectively, where
is the mass of the baryon. As the linear combinations of the Dirac and Pauli form factors, the electric form factor
and magnetic form factor
are the functions of
s [
4]. As a consequence of the optical theorem, there are imaginary parts in both
and
as long as
. According to Equation (
1), the module of electromagnetic FF ratio, i.e.,
, is associated with the polar angle dependence of the baryon pair production rate and could be extracted by analyzing the polar angle distribution of the corresponding baryon. The Coulomb factor
C parameterizes the electromagnetic interaction between the baryon and anti-baryon produced from the virtual photon. For the neutral baryons such as neutron and strange hyperon
, the Coulomb factor equal to unity, while for point-like charged fermions
with
[
5,
6,
7].
After integrating over the polar angle
in Equation (
1), the total production cross section of baryon
B at c.m. energy
takes the form
For the charged spin-1/2 baryon,
in Equation (
2) is canceled by that in the Coulomb factor at any c.m. energy; therefore, a non-zero cross section at the very beginning of the kinematic threshold of process
is expected.
In this review, the production cross section and electromagnetic form factor ratios of the lightest charmed baryon are discussed based on the published results.
2. Previous Measurements
The first hint of a charmed baryon was observed in the interaction between a high-energy neutrino and the hydrogen in the cryogenic bubble chamber at Brookhaven National Laboratory [
8], in which the decay process
was believed to be the intermediate procedure related to the charmed baryons. Later on, the evidence of the lightest charmed baryon
was detected by combining the multi-hadron final states
produced by wide-band photon beam at Fermilab [
9]. The charmed baryon
was firstly reconstructed via the final state hadrons
p,
and
, which were produced by the electron–positron annihilation at MarkII detector in SLAC [
10]. This
golden channel is a Cabibbo-favored weak decay of
, which manifests itself since
is the lowest-lying charmed baryon.
Exclusive pair production cross sections of
was firstly measured by the Belle collaboration with the initial state radiation (ISR) technique at the KEKB asymmetric-energy electron–positron collider [
11], in which the used data samples were taken at the
resonance and nearby continuum with an integrated luminosity of 569 fb
−1.
Figure 1 shows the Feynman diagram for the ISR returned exclusive
events.
To measure the cross section from the
kinematic threshold, a high-energy photon (∼4.3
) should be radiated by the initial electron or positron. Due to the highly suppressed probability of radiating a hard ISR photon, the process
was selected by reconstructing only a
and an ISR photon
to reserve as much as statistics. In this work, the
baryon was reconstructed by combining the corresponding selected final states in the three Cabibbo-favored channels:
,
and
, on which an exactly same mass window around
nominal mass was applied to reject the background events. In addition, to further suppress the combinatorial background, an anti-proton associating with
was required in each combination of
. To select the signal events
exclusively, an asymmetric requirement window around the nominal mass of
on the recoil mass against the combination
was imposed, which was defined as:
where
and
are the total energy and momentum of the
combination, respectively. To measure the exclusive cross section of
process, i.e., the
invariant mass dependence of its production probability, the recoil mass spectrum against
, which was equivalent to
, was extracted. In order to improve the resolution of
spectrum, the energy of ISR photon
was corrected by constraining
to the nominal mass of
.
Clear accumulation of events near the kinematic threshold in the
invariant mass spectrum was observed by the authors, which was then fitted by a relativistic Breit–Wigner function. According to the fit result, the structure was parameterized with the mass
and the total width
. This resonance structure was found to be consistent within uncertainties with the previously observed
charmonium-like state in the process
[
12]. The cross section line-shape of
process was determined by correcting the background-subtracted
spectrum with the differential ISR luminosity and the detection efficiency function. As expected, the resonance structure led to a significant enhancement in the cross section near threshold. Due to the limited statistics, the polar angle distribution thereby the electromagnetic FFs of
were not determined by the Belle collaboration.
3. The BESIII Measurement
Taking advantage of the large statistic energy scan data collected at c.m. energies
,
,
and
Mev, the process
is studied by BESIII both in the production cross section and electromagnetic form factor ratio [
13], where the first energy is only
above the kinematic threshold of
.
Figure 2 illustrates a typical cascade process of the pair production and decay of
. To reserve as much as statistics, at each c.m. energy, a total of ten Cabibbo-favored hadronic decay modes as well as the ten corresponding charge-conjugate channels are independently used to singly reconstruct
or
. Each mode produces a cross-section result and the final cross section is obtained from a weighted average over the 20 individual measurements. The higher statistic data samples at the first and the last c.m. energies enable the study of the polar angle distribution of
in the c.m. system. The ratios between the electric and the magnetic FFs, i.e.,
, are extracted for the first time.
3.1. Cross Section Near Threshold
To extract the number of signal events in each decay channel, the energy difference and the beam-constrained mass , which reflect the energy and momentum conservation are utilized to identify the signals. The energy difference is defined as , where is the energy of the candidate that is obtained by counting the energy of all the final state particles forming and is the average energy of the two colliding beams. With each tagged mode, only the combination of decay products with minimum is reserved. Since the involved c.m. energies are close to the kinematic threshold, no additional hadron is allowed to be produced associated with thereby peaks at zero. Events are further rejected if they are outside the dedicated requirement windows. The beam-constrained mass is defined as , where is the momentum of the candidate. Similarly, there should be a peak around nominal mass in distribution. An un-binned maximum likelihood fit is performed on each distribution to determine the number of signal events with a specific decay pattern of .
After correcting the number of signal events with the integrated luminosity of data sample, the vacuum polarization and ISR correction factors, the signal detection efficiency and the corresponding branching fractions [
14], an individual measurement of the cross section of
process is accomplished. The individual cross sections obtained at the same c.m. energy but in different decay channels are combined using the weighted average method described in Ref. [
15], where the the averaging is performed over all 20 decay channels of the
and
baryons. The total uncertainty of the average cross section is calculated after considering the correlations between any two individual cross sections. The average cross sections at the four c.m. energies are shown in
Figure 3 together with the Belle data [
11] for a comparison.
3.2. Ratio of the Electric and Magnetic form Factors
Based on the relatively larger integrated luminosity at BESIII, the polar angle distributions of process
in its c.m. frame are also studied at
=
and
, respectively. The polar angle of
is defined as
in
Figure 2, and the polar angle distribution is actually the differential production cross section in terms of
. To determine
dependence of signal yields,
of
are divided into ten equivalent bins considering the limited statistics. The
value of each
event is calculated by
, where
is the momentum along the beam direction of
. Similar with the case in cross-section measurement, the number of signal events in each
bin is determined by fitting the corresponding
distributions. For better statistics, the signal events in the same
bin but from different tagged decay modes are combined. After applying one-dimensional bin-by-bin efficiency corrections on these total yields, the authors have obtained the polar angle distributions at the two c.m. energies by tagging
. To further reduce the statistical uncertainty of the polar angle shape parameter, the same procedure is performed by tagging the
decays, and the combined polar angle distribution of
process at each c.m. energy is obtained by combining the corresponding distributions of
and
bin-by-bin. The probability function
is used to fit the combined polar angle distribution, which is illustrated in
Figure 4.
After determining the shape parameters
, the
ratios is extracted using the equation
where
is the velocity of the out-going
as defined in Equation (
1). At BESIII,
of
are determined for the first time to be
and
at
and
, respectively. It is found that
at the c.m. energy closest to the kinematic threshold is consistent with 1 within the uncertainty.
3.3. The Relative Phase between Electric and Magnetic Form Factors
If the electric and magnetic form factors of baryon in the time-like domain are different, they have a non-zero phase [
4,
16]. In the process
where
B is a baryon, the non-vanishing phase between
and
introduces polarization effects to the baryon
B, even if initial state is unpolarized [
16]. Different from the case for the nucleons, if the baryon
B is a strange or charmed hyperon, the polarization of
B is experimentally accessible due to the weak, parity violation decays of
B [
17].
Thanks to the recent completely developed helicity formalism of the weak two-body hadronic decay of hyperons produced by electron–positron annihilations [
18], the BESIII collaboration has also studied the transverse polarization of
in unpolarized electron–positron collisions for the first time [
19]. In this measurement, a total of 567 pb
−1 data samples collected at
are analyzed. For better statistics, four two-body decay channels of
:
,
,
and
are used to probe the transverse polarization of
, which is defined as
where
is the relative phase between the electric and magnetic form factors of
, while
and
are the polar angle and shape parameter of the polar angle distribution shared by the four decay channels, respectively. With a simultaneous un-binned maximum likelihood fit on the four data sets, the relative phase between
and
is extracted to be
with a statistical significance of 2.1 standard deviations.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
Based on the rigorously conducted measurement of the process
by the Belle collaboration [
11], theoretic interpretations of the pair production mechanism of
is proposed and discussed [
20,
21,
22]. Since a clear resonance structure, which is named as
by the authors, is observed in the corresponding cross-section line-shape. The
structure is consistent with the charmonium-like state
, which is observed in the process
[
12]. With a combined fit of cross-section data in
and
process, it is concluded that these two structures originated from the same resonance, which is identified as a
Charmed Baryonium [
21]. According to its large baryon decay rate by comparing that to
, the authors believe that this state is an excellent candidate for a
diquark–antidiquark bound state, which is connected by a string neutralizing their color. The decay of this state to
is a result of the breaking of the string. The authors also exclude any baryon molecule interpretation due to the fact that this structure is sensibly higher than the baryon–antibaryon threshold. In Ref. [
22], it is demonstrated that the enhancement in
cross section measured by Belle could be consistent with the
molecular picture of
taking into account the
final state interaction.
To further study the connection between
in final state
and
in
, a more rigorous investigation of the
process close to the threshold is performed in Ref. [
23]. In this work, except the standing resonance
, a relevant final state interaction in the
system was constructed based on the lines of chiral effective field theory up to next-to-leading order, in which the inherent parameters are determined by a fit to the Belle measured
data. After taking the interplay between
and the final state interaction in
system into consideration, the authors have obtained the resonance parameters of
with improved precision and conclusively confirmed the conjecture that the structures
and
are the same state. However, exploratory fits with the same model can not reconcile the different trends for the c.m. energy dependence of the
cross sections between Belle and BESIII. The authors state that the drastic impact on the resonance parameters of
will be produced if the energy dependence trend of BESIII data persists for higher energies, as indicated by
Figure 5.
After the BESIII collaboration provided the cross sections of
process in the proximity of the threshold with unprecedented precision [
13], theoretic models are proposed to incorporate the BESIII measurements with that of Belle [
24,
25,
26].
In addition to the
resonance structure, a virtual pole generated by
attractive final state interaction is suggested by Ref. [
24] to explain the enhanced cross section right above the
threshold. This pole is regarded as a
molecular virtual state and would become a bound state if
contact coupling were larger. The good fit quality to the data of this combined model suggests the existence of the virtual pole with statistical significance of 4.2 standard deviation. In addition, with the resonance structure
described by the Breit–Wigner function, the continuum contribution, which is motivated by the cross section data of
and
processes, is introduced by Ref. [
25] to fit the combined cross section data from BESIII and Belle. Again, good agreement between the model and cross-section data is achieved; however, the nature of the continuum part is not clearly understood.
The modified vector meson dominance (VMD) model is developed by Ref. [
26] to parameterize the Dirac and Pauli form factors of
, in which the contributions from the intrinsic structure as well as the meson clouds parts are included. Since the charmed baryon
is a isoscalar, the contributions from the isovector mesons are excluded when constructing the VMD model. The electromagnetic FFs of
are obtained by the linear combination of the established Dirac and Pauli FFs, then the
cross sections measured by the Belle and BESIII collaborations are simultaneously fitted with Equation (
2). With the parameters determined by the fit, the authors predicted c.m. energy dependence of a variety of observables related with the electromagnetic FFs of
, including
, the relative phase between
and
and the polarization observables of
. Measurement of these observables can examine the validity of the modified VMD model.
5. Summary and Prospect
As a natural analogy to proton, is the lightest charged baryon that contains a charm quark. Experimental measurements of the production and decay properties of could definitely provide crucial information for the study of both strong and weak interactions; however, the current measurement of Belle suffers from relatively large uncertainty and that of BESIII is limited in a small c.m. energy region near threshold. Therefore, to further resolve the tension between the cross section line-shapes measured by Belle and BESIII, clarify the puzzle related with and mesons and validate the scenarios describing the production mechanism and internal structure of charmed baryon , precision measurements of the cross section as well as the polar angle distributions of process in higher energies at BESIII or other facilities such as Belle II are highly desired.
The Belle II collaboration will accumulate data corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 50 ab
−1 in the following years [
27], which will definitely help to re-examine the pair production of
via the ISR technique. Currently, the BESIII detector has collected scan data at fourteen c.m. energies from
to
with relatively large statistics [
28]. Based on these data sets, it is possible that a high precision production cross-section line-shape will be produced. In addition, by analyzing the polar angle distribution and the helicity angles of the cascade decays of
, even the energy dependent ratio as well as relative phase angle between the electric and magnetic form factors of
can be extracted at BESIII. Anyway, it is worth anticipating that more experimental information will be available in the near future to greatly improve the knowledge about the production mechanism of the charmed baryon
.