An Instanton-Induced Contribution to the Decay of the Eta_c into P-Pbar

Abstract

We compute the decay rate for the process $\eta_c\to p\bar p$ using an effective helicity-flipping proton-antiproton-gluon vertex which incorporates nonperturbative chiral symmetry breaking effects induced by instantons. We fix the strength of the vertex by requiring it to account for the screening of the proton's axial charge observed in deep-inelastic scattering, and we estimate the size of the instanton effects by assuming them to depend linearly on the instanton density. We find that, despite a large suppression, the instanton-induced process occurs with a sizable rate comparable to the observed one, whereas the process is forbidden in perturbative QCD and not understood using standard methods.