Hybrid meson decay from the lattice

Abstract

We discuss the allowed decays of a hybrid meson in the heavy quark limit. We deduce that an important decay will be into a heavy quark non-hybrid state and a light quark meson, in other words, the de-excitation of an excited gluonic string by emission of a light quark-antiquark pair. We discuss the study of hadronic decays from the lattice in the heavy quark limit and apply this approach to explore the transitions from a spin-exotic hybrid to $\ddot{I}{‡}_b\hat{I}\cdot$ and $\ddot{I}{‡}_{b}S$ where $S$ is a scalar meson. We obtain a signal for the transition emitting a scalar meson and we discuss the phenomenological implications.

18 pages, LATEX, 3 ps figures