DECAYS OF HYBRID MESONS

The heavy quark expansion of quantum chromodynamics and the strong cou pling flux tube picture of nonperturbative glue are employed to develo p the phenomenology of hybrid meson decays. The decay mechanism explic itly couples gluonic degrees of freedom to the pair-produced quarks an d hence does nor obey the well-known. but model-dependent. selection r ule which states that hybrids do not decay to pairs of identical L = 0 mesons. However, the nonperturbative nature of gluonic excitations in the flux tube picture leads to a new selection rule: light hybrids do not decay to any pairs of identical mesons. New features of the model are highlighted and partial widths are presented for several low-lyin g hybrid states.