Threshold effects in excited charmed baryon decays

Motivated by recent results on charmed baryons from CLEO and FOCUS, we reexamine the couplings of the orbitally excited charmed baryons. Because of its proximity to the [Formula Presented] threshold, the strong decays of the [Formula Presented] are sensitive to finite width effects. This distorts the shape of the invariant mass spectrum in [Formula Presented] from a simple Breit-Wigner resonance, which has implications for the experimental extraction of the [Formula Presented] mass and couplings. We perform a fit to unpublished CLEO data which gives [Formula Presented] and [Formula Presented] with [Formula Presented] the [Formula Presented] strong coupling in the chiral Lagrangian. We also comment on the new orbitally excited states recently observed by CLEO.