Observation of the decay $h_c\to 3({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}){\pi }^0$

Abstract

Based on $(2712.4\pm 14.1)\times 10^6$ $\psi (3686)$ events collected with the BESIII detector, we study the decays $h_c\to 3({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}){\pi }^0$, $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})\omega$, $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}){\pi }^0\eta$, $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})\eta$, and $h_c\to p\bar{p}$ via $\psi (3686)\to {\pi }^0{h}_c$. The decay channel $h_c\to 3({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}){\pi }^0$ is observed for the first time, and its branching fraction is determined to be $\left(9.28\pm 1.14\pm 0.77\right)\times 10^{-3}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. In addition, first evidence is found for the modes $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}){\pi }^0\eta$ and $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})\omega$ with significances of 4.8$\sigma$ and 4.7$\sigma$, and their branching fractions are determined to be $(7.55\pm 1.51\pm 0.77)\times 10^{-3}$ and $\left(4.00\pm 0.86\pm 0.35\right)\times 10^{-3}$, respectively. No significant signals of $h_c\to 2({\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-})\eta$ and $h_c\to p\bar{p}$ are observed, and the upper limits of the branching fractions of these decays are determined to be $<6.19\times 10^{-4}$ and $<4.40\times 10^{-5}$ at the 90% confidence level, respectively.

11 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Quarkonia and their transitions
• Method for detector description transformation to Unity and application in BESIII
• Further study of the helicity selection rule evading mechanism in ${\eta }_c$, ${\chi }_{c0}$ and $h_c$ decaying to baryon anti-baryon pairs
• Study of the $h_c$($1^1{P}_1$) meson via $\psi (2S)\to {\pi }^0{h}_c$ decays at BESIII

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Measurements of the branching fractions of the $P$-wave charmonium spin-singlet state $h_c{(}^1{P}_1)\to h^{+}{h}^{-}{\pi }^0/\eta$