Study of doubly heavy tetraquarks in Lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to investigate doubly heavy tetraquark states with various quark flavors, revealing stable states below thresholds for spin one configurations, and analyzing mass relations in heavy quark limits.

Contribution

First lattice QCD calculation of doubly heavy tetraquarks across multiple flavors and spins, showing stable states and exploring heavy quark symmetry relations.

Findings

Spin one states are below thresholds, indicating potential stability.

Energy splittings increase as light quark mass decreases, peaking at physical masses.

Mass relations align with heavy quark limit in bottom sector, deviate in charm sector.

Abstract

We present results of a lattice calculation of tetraquark states with quark contents $q_1q_2\bar{Q}\bar{Q}, \, q_1,q_2 \subset u,d,s,c$ and $Q \equiv b,c$ in both spin zero ($J=0$) and spin one ($J=1$) sectors. These calculations are performed on three dynamical $N_f = 2 + 1 + 1$ highly improved staggered quark ensembles at lattice spacings of about 0.12, 0.09 and 0.06 fm. We use the overlap action for light to charm quarks while a non-relativistic action with non-perturbatively improved coefficients with terms up to $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s v^4)$ is employed for the bottom quark. While considering two heavy quarks as charm or bottom, we calculate the energy levels of various four-quark configurations with light quark masses ranging from the physical strange quark mass to that of the corresponding physical pion mass. Results for the spin one states show the presence of ground state energy levels which are below their respective thresholds for all the light flavor combinations with both doubly heavy quarks and particularly for the bottom quarks. Further, we identify a trend that the energy splittings, defined as the energy difference between the ground state energy levels and their respective thresholds, increase with decreasing the light quark masses and are maximum at the physical point for all the spin one states. The rate of increase is however dependent on the light quark configuration of the particular spin one state. We also present a study of hadron mass relations involving tetraquarks, baryons and mesons arising in the limit of infinitely heavy quark and find that these relations are more compatible with the heavy quark limit in the bottom sector but deviate substantially in the charm sector. The ground state spectra of the spin zero tetraquark states with various flavor combinations are seen to lie above their respective thresholds.