Hard-scattering approach to strongly hindered electric dipole transitions between heavy quarkonia

Abstract

The conventional wisdom in dealing with electromagnetic transition between heavy quarkonia is the multipole expansion, when the emitted photon has a typical energy of order quarkonium binding energy. Nevertheless, in the case when the energy carried by the photon is of order typical heavy quark momentum, the multipole expansion doctrine is expected to break down. In this work, we apply the "hard-scattering" approach originally developed to tackle the strongly hindered magnetic dipole ($M1$) transition [Y.~Jia {\it et al.}, Phys. \ Rev. \ D. 82, 014008 (2010)] to the strongly hindered electric dipole ($E1$) transition between heavy quarkonia. We derive the factorization formula for the strongly hindered $E1$ transition rates at the lowest order in velocity and $\alpha_s$ in the context of the non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD), and conduct a detailed numerical comparison with the standard predictions for various bottomonia and charmonia $E1$ transition processes.