QCD predictions for annihilation decays of P-wave quarkonia to next-to-leading order in alpha(s)

The decay rates of P-wave heavy quarkonia to light hadrons are presented to leading order in upsilon(2) and next-to-leading order in alpha(s). They include contributions from both the color-singlet component and the color-octet component of quarkonia. Applying these results to charmonium and using measuring decay rates for the chi(c1) and chi(c2) by E760, we determine the two nonperturbative decay matrix elements, and then predict the hadronic decay rates of chi(c0) and h(c), and the electromagnetic decay rates of chi(c0) and chi(c2). The obtained decay rates of chi(c0) --> LH and chi(c0) --> gamma gamma are in agreement with the Crystal ball results, and also with the new measurements by BES. However, the results for Gamma(chi(c0) --> LH) are dependent on the choice of renormalization scale.