Two-photon decay of heavy quarkonium from heavy-quark spin symmetry

TL;DR

This paper investigates the two-photon decay rates of heavy quarkonium states using an effective Lagrangian approach based on heavy-quark spin symmetry, providing predictions that align with some experiments and suggesting methods to extract fundamental constants.

Contribution

It applies local operator expansion and heavy-quark spin symmetry to compute two-photon decay widths of heavy quarkonia, including excited states, and discusses their implications for measuring the strong coupling constant.

Findings

Predicted $ ext{eta}_c$ two-photon width agrees with experiment.

Predicted $ ext{eta}_c(2S)$ width is twice the CLEO estimate.

Ratio of $ ext{eta}_b$ to $ ext{Upsilon}$ widths can determine $oldsymbol{ ext{alpha}_s}$.

Abstract

With the recent measurements on $\eta_{c}$ and $\eta_{c}^{\prime}$ at CLEO, Babar and Belle, and with the prospect of finding the $\eta_{b}$ at the Tevatron, it seems appropriate to have another look at the two-photon decay of heavy quarkonium from the standpoint of an effective Lagrangian based on local operator expansion and heavy-quark spin symmetry. In this talk, I would like to discuss a recent work on the two-photon decay rates of ground states and excited states of $\eta_c$ and $\eta_b$ using the local operator expansion approach and heavy-quark spin symmetry and taking into account the binding-energy. We find that the predicted two-photon width for $\eta_c$ agrees well with experiment, but the predicted value for $\eta_c(2S)$ is twice larger than the CLEO estimation. We point out that the essentially model-independent ratio of $\eta_b$ two-photon width to the $\Upsilon$ leptonic width and the $\eta_b $ two-photon width could be used to extract the strong coupling constant $\alpha_s$ .