Heavy Hadrons in Nuclear Matter

TL;DR

This review explores the theoretical understanding of heavy hadrons in nuclear matter, focusing on their interactions, structure, and modifications, to inform future experimental investigations.

Contribution

It synthesizes current theoretical concepts and emphasizes the importance of studying heavy hadrons in nuclear environments, including finite nuclei, which is a relatively comprehensive overview.

Findings

Heavy hadron properties are significantly modified in nuclear matter.

Interactions between heavy hadrons and nucleons are crucial for understanding nuclear structure.

Modifications in quarkonia and heavy-light mesons provide insights into QCD vacuum properties.

Abstract

Current studies on heavy hadrons in nuclear medium are reviewed with a summary of the basic theoretical concepts of QCD, namely chiral symmetry, heavy quark spin symmetry, and the effective Lagrangian approach. The nuclear matter is an interesting place to study the properties of heavy hadrons from many different points of view. We emphasize the importance of the following topics: (i) charm/bottom hadron-nucleon interaction, (ii) structure of charm/bottom nuclei, and (iii) QCD vacuum properties and hadron modifications in nuclear medium. We pick up three different groups of heavy hadrons, quarkonia ($J/\psi$, $\Upsilon$), heavy-light mesons ($D$/$\bar{D}$, $\bar{B}$/$B$) and heavy baryons ($\Lambda_{c}$, $\Lambda_{b}$). The modifications of those hadrons in nuclear matter provide us with important information to investigate the essential properties of heavy hadrons. We also give the discussions about the heavy hadrons, not only in nuclear matter with infinite volume, but also in atomic nuclei with finite baryon numbers, to serve future experiments.