Hyperfine mixing in $b\to c$ semileptonic decay of doubly heavy baryons

We qualitatively corroborate the results of W. Roberts and M. Pervin in Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 24, 2401 (2009) according to which hyperfine mixing greatly affects the decay widths of $b\to c$ semileptonic decays involving doubly heavy $bc$ baryons. However, our predictions for the decay widths of the unmixed states differ from those reported in the work of Roberts and Pervin by a factor of 2, and this discrepancy translates to the mixed case. We further show that the predictions of heavy quark spin symmetry, might be used in the future to experimentally extract information on the admixtures in the actual physical $bc$ baryons, in a model independent manner.