Hybrid Decays

The heavy quark expansion of Quantum Chromodynamics and the strong coupling flux tube picture of nonperturbative glue are employed to develop the phenomenology of hybrid meson decays. The decay mechanism explicitly couples gluonic degrees of freedom to the pair produced quarks and hence does not obey the well known, but model-dependent, selection rule which states that hybrids do not decay to pairs of L = 0 mesons. However, the nonperturbative nature of gluonic excitations in the flux tube picture leads to a new selection rule: light hybrids do not decay to pairs of identical mesons. New features of the model are highlighted and partial widths are presented for several low lying hybrid states. Typeset using REVTEX 1