Doubly heavy-quark baryon spectroscopy and semileptonic decay

Working in the framework of a nonrelativistic quark model we evaluate the spectra and semileptonic decay widths for the ground state of doubly heavy Xi and Omega baryons. We solve the three-body problem using a variational ansatz made possible by the constraints imposed by heavy-quark spin symmetry. In order to check the dependence of our results on the inter-quark interaction, we have used five different quark-quark potentials which include Coulomb and hyperfine terms coming from one-gluon exchange, plus a confining term. Our results for the spectra are in good agreement with a previous calculation done using a Faddeev approach. For the semileptonic decay our results for the total decay widths are in good agreement with the ones obtained within a relativistic quark model in the quark-diquark approximation.