Heavy quarkonium spectrum and production/annihilation rates to order image Original Research Article

We compute the third-order corrections to the heavy quarkonium spectrum and production/annihilation rates due to the leading renormalization group running of the static potential. The previously known complete image result for the heavy quarkonium ground state energy is extended to the exited states. After including the image corrections the perturbative results are in surprisingly good agreement with the experimental data on the masses of the excited ϒ resonances and the leptonic width of the image meson. The impact of the corrections on the ϒ sum rules and top quark–antiquark threshold production cross section is also discussed.