Masses and Weak Decay Properties of Heavy-quark Baryons from QCD Sum Rules and Production of Heavy Mesons in High Energy Collisions

Quantum Chromodynamics Sum Rules (QCD Sum Rules) is a non-perturbative technique which uses Wilson’s Operator Product Expansion of n-point functions and quark-hadron
duality together to extract various physical properties of hadrons. In this dissertation, we use QCD Sum Rules to calculate the masses of charmed lambda ( Λ_c⁺ ), strange lambda ( Λ⁰), and bottom lambda ( Λ_b⁰) baryons. We extend this framework to consider charm to strange quark transition in the presence of an external pion field to estimate the coupling corresponding to the Cabibbo-favored weak decay process: Λ_c --> Λ^{0 +} π^{+ .} This framework can be used further to estimate the Cabibbo-favored and Cabibbo-suppressed decays of the heavy-quark baryons. In the second part of this dissertation, we calculate the production cross-section of B mesons in unpolarized proton-proton and and heavy-ion collisions at square root s = 200 GeV with the main aspect being the fragmentation of a color-octet bottom-antibottom quark pair to create B mesons.