A note on the fate of the Landau–Yang theorem in non-Abelian gauge theories

Using elementary considerations of Lorentz invariance, Bose symmetry and BRST invariance, we argue why the decay of a massive color-octet vector state into a pair of on-shell massless gluons is possible in a non-Abelian SU(N) Yang–Mills theory, we constrain the form of the amplitude of the process and offer a simple understanding of these results in terms of effective-action operators.