Enhanced breaking of heavy quark spin symmetry

Feng-Kun Guo, Ulf-G. Meißner, Cheng-Ping Shen

Published 2014-06-25, updated 2014-09-25Version 2

Heavy quark spin symmetry is useful to make predictions on ratios of decay or production rates of systems involving heavy quarks. The breaking of spin symmetry is generally of the order of $O({\Lambda_{\rm QCD}/m_Q})$, with $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}$ the scale of QCD and $m_Q$ the heavy quark mass. In this paper, we will show that a small $S$- and $D$-wave mixing in the wave function of the heavy quarkonium could induce a large breaking in the ratios of partial decay widths. As an example, we consider the decays of the $\Upsilon(10860)$ into the $\chi_{bJ}\omega\, (J=0,1,2)$, which were recently measured by the Belle Collaboration. These decays exhibit a huge breaking of the spin symmetry relation were the $\Upsilon(10860)$ a pure $5S$ bottomonium state. We propose that this could be a consequence of a mixing of the $S$-wave and $D$-wave components in the $\Upsilon(10860)$. Prediction on the ratio $\Gamma(\Upsilon(10860)\to\chi_{b0}\omega)/\Gamma(\Upsilon(10860)\to\chi_{b2}\omega)$ is presented assuming that the decay of the $D$-wave component is dominated by the coupled-channel effects.