Test of the heavy quark-light diquark approximation for baryons with a heavy quark

We check a commonly used approximation in which a baryon with a heavy quark is described as a heavy quark-light diquark system. The heavy quark influences the diquark internal motion reducing the average distance between the two light quarks. Besides, we show how the average distance between the heavy quark and any of the light quarks, and that between the heavy quark and the center of mass of the light diquark. are smaller than the distance between the two light quarks, which seems to contradict the heavy quark-light diquark picture. This latter result is in agreement with expectations from QCD sum rules and lattice QCD calculations. Our results also show that the diquark approximations produces larger masses than the ones obtained in a full calculation. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.