T-violating triple-product correlations in charmless Λb decays

Using factorization, we compute, within the standard model, the T-violating triple-product correlations in the charmless decays Lambda(b) --> F1F2, where F-1 is a light spin-(1)/(2) baryon and F-2 is a pseudoscalar (P) or vector (V) meson. We find a large triple-product asymmetry of 18% for the decay Lambda(b) --> pK(-). However, for other classes of Lambda(b) --> F1V decays, the asymmetry is found to be at most at the percent level. For Lambda(b) --> F1V decays, we find that all triple-product asymmetries are small (at most O(1 %)) for a transversely-polarized V, and are even smaller for longitudinal polarization. Our estimates of the nonfactorizable contributions to these decays show them to be negligible, and we describe ways of testing this. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.