Rigorous QCD Predictions for Decays of P-Wave Quarkonia

Abstract

We present a new factorization theorem for the decay rates of P-wave states of heavy quarkonia. Infrared logarithms that had appeared in previous perturbative calculations of P-wave decays are absorbed into a quantity that is related to the amplitude for the heavy quark and antiquark to be in a relative color-octet S-wave state. We predict all of the light-hadronic and electromagnetic decays rates of the $χ_c$ and $h_c$ states in terms of two phenomenological parameters.