Corrections For Two Photon Decays of chi_{c0} and chi_{c2} and Color Octet Contributions

J. P. Ma, Q. Wang

Published 2002-03-08, updated 2002-07-18Version 3

Using the fact that the c-quark inside a charmonium moves with a small velocity v in the charmonium rest-frame, one can employ an expansion in v to study decays of charmonia and results at the leading order for chi_{c0,2} --> gamma gamma exist in the literature. We study corrections at the next-to-leading order in the framework of nonrelativistic QCD(NRQCD) factorization. The study presented here is different than previous approaches where chi_{c0,2} is taken as a bound-state of a c cbar pair and a nonrelativistic wave-function is used for the pair. We find that the corrections are consist not only of relativistic corrections, but also of corrections from Fock state components of chi_{c0,2} in which the c cbar pair is in a color-octet state. For chi_{c2} there is also a contribution from a Fock state component in which the pair is in a F-wave state. We determine the factorization formula for decay widths in the form of NRQCD matrix elements representing nonperturbative effects related to chi_{c0,2}, and calculate the perturbative coefficients at tree-level. Because the NRQCD matrix elements are unknown, a detailed prediction for the decay chi_{c0,2} --> gamma gamma can not be made, but the effect of these corrections can be determined at certain level. Estimations show that the effect is significant and can not be neglected.