Interquark potential for the charmonium system with almost physical quark masses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel lattice QCD method to determine the interquark potential for charmonium, incorporating finite quark mass effects and providing insights for refining quark potential models.

Contribution

It presents a new approach using the Bethe-Salpeter wavefunction to evaluate interquark potentials at finite quark masses from lattice QCD, including spin-dependent and independent parts.

Findings

Potential approaches the static limit in quenched QCD.

First-principles potential for charmonium in dynamical QCD.

Potential improvements for quark potential models.

Abstract

We study an interquark QQ^bar potential for the charmonium system, that is determined from the the equal-time and Coulomb gauge QQ^bar Bethe-Salpeter (BS) wavefunction through the effective Schr\"odinger equation. This novel approach enables us to evaluate a kinetic heavy quark mass m_Q and a proper interquark potential at finite quark mass m_Q, which receives all orders of 1/m_Q corrections on the static QQ^bar potential from Wilson loops, simultaneously. Precise information of the interquark potential for both charmonium and bottomonium states directly from lattice QCD provides us a chance to improve quark potential models, where the spin-independent interquark potential is phenomenologically described by the Cornell potential and the spin-dependent parts are deduced within the framework of perturbative QCD, from first-principles calculations. In this study, calculations are carried out in both quenched and dynamical fermion simulations. We first demonstrate that the interquark potential at finite quark mass calculated by the BS amplitude method smoothly approaches the conventional static heavy quark potential from Wilson loops in the infinitely heavy quark limit within quenched lattice QCD simulations. Secondly, we determine both spin-independent and -dependent parts of the interquark potential for the charmonium system in 2+1 flavor dynamical lattice QCD using the PACS-CS gauge configurations at the lightest pion mass, M_\pi=156 MeV.