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Selection Rules for Hadronic Transitions of XYZ Mesons

Many of the XYZ mesons discovered in the last decade can be identified as bound states of a heavy quark and antiquark in Born-Oppenheimer (B-O) potentials defined by the energy of gluon and light-quark fields in the presence of static color sources. The mesons include quarkonium hybrids, which are bound states in excited flavor-singlet B-O potentials, and quarkonium tetraquarks, which are bound states in flavor-nonsinglet B-O potentials. The deepest hybrid potentials are known from lattice QCD calculations. The deepest tetraquark potentials can be inferred from lattice QCD calculations of static adjoint mesons. Selection rules for hadronic transitions are derived and used to identify XYZ mesons that are candidates for ground-state energy levels in the B-O potentials for charmonium hybrids and tetraquarks.