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

Abstract

With the recent measurements on $η_{c}$ and $η_{c}^{\prime}$ at CLEO, Babar and Belle, and with the prospect of finding the $η_{b}$ 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 $η_c$ and $η_b$ 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 $η_c$ agrees well with experiment, but the predicted value for $η_c(2S)$ is twice larger than the CLEO estimation. We point out that the essentially model-independent ratio of $η_b$ two-photon width to the $Υ$ leptonic width and the $η_b $ two-photon width could be used to extract the strong coupling constant $α_s$ .