Excited charmonium decays by flux-tube breaking and the ψ′ anomaly at CDF Original Research Article

The hadronic decay of radially and orbitally excited charmonium above charm threshold by 3P0 pair creation and chromoelectric flux-tube breaking is discussed in an harmonic oscillator approximation. We find independent evidence from a study of widths for a 2S admixture in the predominantly 1D state ψ(3770), and explore the possibility of metastable radially excited 2 3P0,1,2 states being a source of the anomalously large production of ψ′ at the Tevatron. At least one of them is expected to be narrow as a consequence of the existence of nodes in the radial wave function.