Hybrid meson decay from lattice QCD

Abstract: Besides the conventional hadrons containing valence quarks and valence antiquarks, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) suggests the existence of the hybrid hadrons containing valence gluons in addition to the quarks and antiquarks, and some experiments may have found some. A decisive experimental confirmation of its existence, however, is still needed. At present, lattice simulations have offered the practicable ways of theoretically guiding us to search for the hybrid states. In this dissertation, we study the spectroscopy and the decay rate of the heavy hybrid mesons made of a heavy $b$ quark, a heavy $\bar b$ antiquark, and a gluon ($b\bar{b}g$) to selected channels, and use lattice methods to extract the transition matrix elements in full QCD. We are particular interested in the spin-exotic hybrid mesons. For sufficiently heavy quarks (e.g., $b$ quark), we use the leading Born-Oppenheimer (LBO) approximation to calculate the static potential energy at all $b\bar{b}$ separations. Then, by solving the Schr\"odinger equation with this potential, we reconstruct the motion of the heavy quarks. In a similar way we can determine decay rates. In this dissertation, we use the numerical lattice method to calculate the mass of the $f_0$ meson at a single lattice spacing and light quark mass, namely, $m_{f_0} = (768 \pm 136)$ MeV. Most of all we consider the decay channels involving the production of a scalar meson. We obtain the partial decay rate ($\Gamma$) for the channel $ H \rightarrow \chi_b + \pi + \pi $, namely, $ \Gamma = 3.62(98)$ MeV. All of our results are consistent with those of other researchers. Knowledge of the masses and the decay rates should help us considerably in experimental searches for the hybrid mesons.