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 ) .