Strong decays of hybrid mesons from the heavy quark expansion of QCD

We calculate the strong decays of hybrid mesons to conventional mesons for all the lowest lying JPC hybrids of flavour u bar u, d bar d, s bar s, c bar c and b bar b. A decay operator developed from the heavy quark expansion of quantum chromodynamics is employed. We show that the selection rule that hybrid mesons do not decay to identical S-wave mesons, found in other models, is preserved. We predict decays of charmonium hybrids, discuss decays of JPC=1-+ exotic isovector hybrids of various masses, and interpret the π(1800) as a hybrid meson. copyright 1998 American Institute of Physics