Strong and Electromagnetic Transitions in Heavy Flavor Mesons

The electromagnetic and pionic transitions in mesons with heavy flavor quarks are calculated within the framework of the covariant Blankenbecler-Sugar equation. The M1 transitions in the charmonium system are shown to be sensitive to the relativistic aspect of the spin-flip magnetic moment operator, and the Lorentz structure of the Q\bar Q interaction. The observed rate for the M1 transition J/psi -> eta_c gamma is shown to provide strong evidence for a scalar confining interaction. The single pion and dipion widths are calculated for the heavy-light D mesons, by employment of the pseudovector pion-quark coupling suggested by chiral perturbation theory. The pionic transitions D* -> D pi are shown to provide constraining information on the pion-quark axial coupling g_A^q. It is also shown that axial exchange charge contributions associated with the Q\bar q interaction suppress the axial charge amplitude for pion emission by an order of magnitude. The models for pi and M1 transitions also make it possible to estimate the eta-nucleon coupling from the transition Ds* -> D_s pi0, once the value of the pi^0 - eta mixing angle is known. Finally, the dipion transition rates of the L=1 D mesons are calculated, and are shown to make up a significant fraction of their total widths for strong decay. The pipi transitions between S-wave charmonium and bottomonium states are modeled in terms of a broad sigma meson with derivative couplings to pions.