Lattice string breaking and heavy meson decays

We show how string breaking on the lattice, treated as a mixing effect, can be related to decay rates for heavy quark systems. We use this to make a preliminary calculation of the energy split at maximum mixing for static quarks in QCD from the decay rate for ϒ(4S)→BB̄ . We extend the calculation to achieve rough estimates for the contributions of channels involving B, B∗, Bs and Bs∗ mesons to the width of the ϒ(5S) .