Hadro-quarkonium from Lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to investigate whether light hadrons can bind with heavy quarkonium, finding very small binding energies that suggest weak interactions in the heavy quark limit.

Contribution

First lattice QCD analysis of hadro-quarkonium potential, providing quantitative insights into the interaction strength between heavy quarkonium and light hadrons.

Findings

Binding energies are smaller than a few MeV.

Configurations are energetically favored.

Small attraction may not support bound states in the infinite volume limit.

Abstract

The hadro-quarkonium picture [S. Dubinskiy and M.B. Voloshin, Phys. Lett. B 666, 344 (2008)] provides one possible interpretation for the pentaquark candidates with hidden charm, recently reported by the LHCb Collaboration, as well as for some of the charmonium-like "X,Y,Z" states. In this picture, a heavy quarkonium core resides within a light hadron giving rise to four- or five-quark/antiquark bound states. We test this scenario in the heavy quark limit by investigating the modification of the potential between a static quark-antiquark pair induced by the presence of a hadron. Our lattice QCD simulations are performed on a Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) ensemble with $N_f = 2+1$ flavours of non-perturbatively improved Wilson quarks at a pion mass of about 223 MeV and a lattice spacing of about 0.0854 fm. We study the static potential in the presence of a variety of light mesons as well as of octet and decuplet baryons. In all these cases, the resulting configurations are favoured energetically. The associated binding energies between the quarkonium in the heavy quark limit and the light hadron are found to be smaller than a few MeV, similar in strength to deuterium binding. It needs to be seen if the small attraction survives in the infinite volume limit and supports bound states or resonances.