Lattice string breaking and heavy meson decays

Abstract

We show how string breaking on the lattice, treated as a mixing effect, can be related to decay rates for heavy quark systems. We use this to make a preliminary calculation of the energy split at maximum mixing for static quarks in QCD from the decay rate for ϒ(4S)→B B ̄ . We extend the calculation to achieve rough estimates for the contributions of channels involving B, B ∗ , B s and B s ∗ mesons to the width of the ϒ(5 S) .