Excited heavy meson decays to light vector mesons: implications for spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper studies the strong decays of excited heavy mesons into light vector mesons using effective field theories based on heavy quark symmetries and hidden gauge symmetry, providing decay predictions and a classification scheme.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective Lagrangian framework for heavy meson decays into light vector mesons, enabling decay ratio predictions and meson classification.

Findings

Predicted decay width ratios independent of strong couplings.

Proposed classification for newly observed heavy-light mesons.

Provided theoretical decay patterns for excited heavy mesons.

Abstract

We analyze strong decays of excited charmed and beauty mesons into a light vector meson, exploiting the effective field theory based on heavy quark (HQ) symmetries for heavy mesons, and on the hidden gauge symmetry to incorporate light vector mesons. HQ symmetries allow to classify the heavy mesons in spin doublets, and to relate decays of excited states. We build effective Lagrangian terms governing the ${\cal H}_i \to P^{(*)} V$ modes, with ${\cal H}_i$ an excited $s$, $p$, $d$ and $f$-wave heavy-light quark meson, $P,\,P^*$ the lowest-lying $J^P=(0^-,\,1^-)$ heavy-light mesons, and V a light vector meson. Predictions are provided for ratios of decay widths that are independent of the strong couplings in the effective Lagrangian terms. A classification of the newly observed heavy-light mesons is proposed.