Fission of bags by spontaneous quark-antiquark pair production in supercritical colour fields

We describe the fission of heavy quarkonia as the decay of the bag vacuum state by spontaneous creation of a light quark-antiquark pair due to super-critical colour-electric fields. In the adiabatic approximation the heavy quarks are reduced to two point charges fixed at the foci of a prolate ellipsoidal MIT bag. We solve the Dirac equation with the corresponding quasi-abelian potential numerically and estimate the critical heavy-quark separation, at which the energy needed to produce the light quark pair approaches zero, to be 2.2 fm for the value 4αs/3=0.385 of the strong coupling constant and the vacuum pressure B^1/4=235 MeV. These values have been used previously by Hasenfratz et al. to reproduce the spectra of heavy quarkonia. We show that this "critical distance" lies just above the classical turning point of those c {Mathematical expression}- and b {Mathematical expression}-resonances which are presently known. © 1983 Springer-Verlag.

Duke Scholars

Author Berndt Mueller Physics