Strong decays of the lowest bottomonium hybrid within an extended Born–Oppenheimer framework

We analyze the decays of the theoretically predicted lowest bottomonium hybrid H (1 P ) to open bottom two-meson states. We do it by embedding a quark pair creation model into the Born–Oppenheimer framework which allows for a unified, QCD-motivated description of bottomonium hybrids as well as bottomonium. A new ^1P_1 decay model for H (1 P ) comes out. The same analysis applied to bottomonium leads naturally to the well-known ^3P_0 decay model. We show that H (1 P ) and the theoretically predicted bottomonium state (5S) , whose calculated masses are close to each other, have very different widths for such decays. A comparison with data from (10860) , an experimental resonance whose mass is similar to that of (5S) and H (1 P ), is carried out. Neither a (5S) nor a H (1 P ) assignment can explain the measured decay widths. However, a (5S) – H (1 P ) mixing may give account of them supporting previous analyses of dipion decays of (10860) and suggesting a possible experimental evidence of H (1 P ).