Relativistic effects are important in the rigorous study of heavy quarks. In this paper, we study the relativistic corrections of semileptonic $B_c$ decays to charmonium with the instantaneous Bethe-Salpeter method. Within the Bethe-Salpeter framework, we use two methods to study the relativistic effects. One of them is to expand the transition amplitude in powers of $\overrightarrow{q}$ which is the relative momentum between the quark and antiquark, and the other is to expand the amplitude base on the wave functions. In the level of decay width, the results show that, for the transition of $B_c\to {\eta }_c$, the relativistic correction is about 22%; for $B_c\to J/\psi$, it is about 19%; the relativistic effects of $1P$ final states are about 14%–46% larger than those of $1S$ final states; for $2S$ final states, they are about 19%–28% larger than those of $1S$ final states; for $3S$ final states, they are about 12%–13% larger than those of $2S$ final states; for $2P$ final states, they are about 10%–14% larger than those of $1P$ final states; for $3P$ final states, they are about 7%–12% larger than those of $2P$ final states. We conclude that the relativistic corrections of the $B_c$ decays to the orbitally or radially excited charmonium (2S, 3S, 1P, 2P, 3P) are quite large.

• Received 4 November 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.013006

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Published by the American Physical Society