Abstract

Exclusive nonleptonic decays of bottom and charm baryons are studied within a relativistic three-quark model with a Gaussian shape for the momentum dependence of the baryon-three-quark vertex. We include factorizing as well as nonfactorizing contributions to the decay amplitudes. For heavy-to-light transitions Q-->qud the total contribution of the nonfactorizing diagrams amount up to similar to 60% of the factorizing contributions in amplitude, and up to similar to 30% for b-->c(u) over bard$ transitions. We calculate the rates and the polarization asymmetry parameters for various nonleptonic decays and compare them to existing data and to the results of other model calculations.