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Hybrid to quarkonia transitions

Rubén Oncala1 and Joan Soto2,3

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 116004 – Published 2 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/v5h3-ww3s

Abstract

Hybrid quarkonia—exotic hadrons with explicit gluonic degrees of freedom—have gained increasing attention in hadron spectroscopy, particularly with the ongoing discovery of new XYZ mesons. In this work, we update the spectrum of heavy hybrid mesons in the charmonium and bottomonium sectors using the Born-Oppenheimer effective field theory framework, by incorporating the latest lattice QCD results for hybrid static potentials. We refine earlier calculations and analyze allowed transitions from hybrids to conventional quarkonia, including both spin-conserved and spin-flip decays. We carry out a comprehensive error analysis and discuss the reliability of our results. We compare them to experimental data of the Particle Data Group, which allows us to identify hybrid candidates among the observed XYZ states. We provide hybrid or quarkonium interpretations for nearly all heavy isospin-zero mesons observed and incorporate new hybrid candidates.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 116004– Published 2 June, 2026
  • Received 6 December 2025
  • Accepted 22 April 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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