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 resultson the inter-quark interaction we have used five different quarkquark potentials which include Coulomb and hyperfine terms coming fromone-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 a good agreement with the ones obtained within a relativistic quark model in the quark-diquark approximation.