Doubly heavy hadrons and the domain of validity of doubly heavy diquark-antiquark symmetry

In the limit of heavy quark masses going to infinity, a symmetry is known to emerge in QCD relating properties of hadrons with two heavy quarks to analogous states with one heavy antiquark. A key question is whether the charm mass is heavy enough so that this symmetry is manifest in at least an approximate manner. The issue is crucial in attempting to understand the recent reports by the SELEX Collaboration of doubly charmed baryons. We argue on very general grounds that the charm quark mass is substantially too light for the symmetry to emerge automatically via color coulombic interactions. However, the symmetry could emerge approximately depending on the dynamical details of the nonperturbative physics. To treat the problem systematically, a new expansion that simultaneously incorporates NRQCD and HQET is needed.