Decay and electromagnetic production of strongly coupled quarkonia in pNRQCD

Abstract

We improve the pNRQCD approach to annihilation processes of heavy quarkonium and make first pNRQCD predictions for exclusive electromagnetic production of heavy quarkonium. We consider strongly coupled quarkonia, i.e., quarkonia that are not Coulombic bound states. Possible strongly coupled quarkonia include excited charmonium and bottomonium states. For these, pNRQCD provides expressions for the decay and exclusive electromagnetic production NRQCD matrix elements that depend on the wavefunctions at the origin and few universal gluon field correlators. We compute electromagnetic decay widths and exclusive production cross sections, and inclusive decay widths into light hadrons for $P$-wave quarkonia at relative order $v^2$ and leading order, respectively. We also compute the decay widths of $2S$ and $3S$ bottomonium states into lepton pairs and their ratios with the inclusive widths into light hadrons at relative order $v^2$.