T-Violating Triple-Product Correlations in Charmless Lambda_b Decays

Using factorization, we compute, within the standard model, the T-violating triple-product correlations in the charmless decays Lambda_b -> F_1 F_2, where F_1 is a light spin-1/2 baryon and F_2 is a pseudoscalar (P) or vector (V) meson. We find a large triple-product asymmetry of 18% for the decay Lambda_b -> p K^-. However, for other classes of Lambda_b -> F_1 P decays, the asymmetry is found to be at most at the percent level. For Lambda_b -> F_1 V decays, we find that all triple-product asymmetries are small (at most O(1%)) for a transversely-polarized V, and are even smaller for longitudinal polarization. Our estimates of the nonfactorizable contributions to these decays show them to be negligible, and we describe ways of testing this.