UC San Diego

Evidence for the existence of exotic, pentaquark baryons was first found in the invariant mass spectrum of a baryon-meson pair, with the baryon in the octet of flavor SU(3). Exotic pentaquarks may also decay into members of the spin-3/2 baryon decuplet. We calculate relations between decay rates of the exotic pentaquark into a baryon decuplet and an octet of pseudoscalar mesons based on SU(3) flavor symmetry, including the leading flavor symmetry breaking term. We consider all possible representations for an exotic pentaquark, namely, that it belongs to either a \bar{10}, 27, or 35 representation of flavor SU(3). In addition, we use the approximate SU(6) spin-flavor symmetry of baryons to derive relations between the reduced matrix elements of our calculation and those of an existing analogous calculation for decays into the baryon octet. By comparing several decay rates of exotics into both octet and decuplet baryons, our results could be used to elucidate the SU(3) nature of pentaquarks.