Strong charmonium decays in a microscopic model

Although the spectra of heavy quarkonium systems have been successfully explained by certain QCD motivated potential models, their strong decays are still an open problem. We perform a microscopic calculation of vector charmonium strong decays into open-charm mesons where the image pairs are created from the same interquark interactions acting in the quark model that has been used to describe its spectrum, and also its leptonic and radiative decays. We compare the numerical results with those predicted by the image decay model and with the available experimental data, and discuss the possible influence on the strong widths of the different terms of the potential. A comparison with other predictions from similar microscopic decay models is also included. Although the model gives a fair description of the charmonium spectrum, the microscopic calculation of the decay widths does not provide any improvement of the results obtained with the phenomenological image model.