Triangle Singularity in the Production of $X(3872)$ and a Photon in $e^+e^-$ Annihilation
Eric Braaten, Li-Ping He, Kevin Ingles

TL;DR
This paper predicts a narrow peak in the cross section of $e^+ e^- o X(3872) ext{ and } ext{photon}$ caused by a triangle singularity, which could be observed experimentally, providing insight into the nature of $X(3872)$ as a charm-meson molecule.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel prediction of a triangle singularity effect in $e^+ e^-$ annihilation producing $X(3872)$ and a photon, with specific experimental signatures.
Findings
A narrow peak in the cross section near 2.2 MeV above the $D^{*0} ar D^{*0}$ threshold.
The peak is caused by a triangle singularity in the production mechanism.
The predicted peak is potentially observable by the BESIII detector.
Abstract
If the is a weakly bound charm-meson molecule, it can be produced in annihilation by the creation of from a virtual photon followed by the rescattering of the charm-meson pair into and a photon. A triangle singularity produces a narrow peak in the cross section for about 2.2 MeV above the threshold. We predict the normalized cross section in the region near the peak. The peak from the triangle singularity may be observable by the BESIII detector.
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Triangle Singularity in the Production of
and a Photon in Annihilation
Eric Braaten
Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Li-Ping He
Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Kevin Ingles
Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Abstract
If the is a weakly bound charm-meson molecule, it can be produced in annihilation by the creation of from a virtual photon followed by the rescattering of the charm-meson pair into and a photon. A triangle singularity produces a narrow peak in the cross section for about 2.2 MeV above the threshold. We predict the normalized cross section in the region near the peak. The peak from the triangle singularity may be observable by the BESIII detector.
Exotic hadrons, charm mesons, effective field theory, triangle singularity.
pacs:
14.80.Va, 67.85.Bc, 31.15.bt
Since early in this century, a large number of exotic hadrons whose constituents include a heavy quark and its antiquark have been discovered in high energy physics experiments Chen:2016qju ; Hosaka:2016pey ; Lebed:2016hpi ; Esposito:2016noz ; Guo:2017jvc ; Ali:2017jda ; Olsen:2017bmm ; Karliner:2017qhf ; Yuan:2018inv . The first on the list of these exotic heavy hadrons is the meson, which was discovered in 2003 in exclusive decays of mesons into by observing the decay of into Choi:2003ue . The quantum numbers of were eventually determined to be Aaij:2013zoa . Its mass is extremely close to the threshold, with the difference being only MeV Tanabashi:2018oca . This suggests that is a weakly bound S-wave charm-meson molecule with the flavor structure
[TABLE]
There are however alternative models for the Chen:2016qju ; Hosaka:2016pey ; Lebed:2016hpi ; Esposito:2016noz ; Guo:2017jvc ; Ali:2017jda ; Olsen:2017bmm ; Karliner:2017qhf . The has been observed in many more decay modes than any of the other exotic heavy hadrons. In addition to , it has been observed in , , , , , and most recently Ablikim:2019soz . Despite its observation in 7 different decay modes, a consensus on the nature of has not been achieved.
There may be aspects of the production of that are more effective at discriminating between models than the decays of . One way in which the nature of a hadron can be revealed by its production is through triangle singularities. Triangle singularities are kinematic singularities that arise if three virtual particles that form a triangle in a Feynman diagram can all be on their mass shells simultaneously. There have been several previous investigations of the effects of triangle singularities on the production of exotic heavy mesons Szczepaniak:2015eza ; Liu:2015taa ; Szczepaniak:2015hya ; Guo:2017wzr . Guo has recently pointed out that any high-energy process that can create at short distances in an S-wave channel will produce with a narrow peak near the threshold due to a triangle singularity Guo:2019qcn . One such process is electron-positron annihilation, which can create an S-wave pair recoiling against a . Guo suggested that the peak in the line shape for due to the triangle singularity could be used to determine the binding energy of more accurately than a direct mass measurement.
If the is a weakly bound charm-meson molecule, it can be produced by any reaction that can produce its constituents and . It can be produced by the creation of and at short distances of order , where is the charm quark mass, followed by the binding of the charm mesons into at longer distances. The can also be produced by the creation of at short distances followed by the rescattering of the charm-meson pair into and a pion at longer distances Braaten:2018eov . The rescattering mechanism predicts that the Dalitz plot from the decay of a meson into should be dominated by a resonance band from the decay into and a smooth distribution in invariant mass from the rescattering of Braaten:2019yua . The production of accompanied by a pion from rescattering provides an additional production mechanism for at a high-energy hadron collider that could help explain the large prompt production rate of that has been observed at the Tevatron and the LHC Braaten:2018eov ; Braaten:2019sxh .
The quantum numbers of the imply that can be produced directly by annihilation into a virtual photon. This process can proceed through the creation of at short distances in a P-wave channel, followed by the rescattering of the charm-meson pair into . The production of in annihilation near the threshold was discussed previously by Dubynskiy and Voloshin Dubynskiy:2006cj . They calculated the absorptive contribution to the cross section from annihilation into on-shell charm mesons followed by their rescattering into . They predicted that the cross section has a peak only a few MeV above the threshold, although they did not predict its normalization. In retrospect, this peak comes from a triangle singularity.
In this paper, we calculate the cross section for near the threshold. We show that the absorptive contribution considered in Ref. Dubynskiy:2006cj is not a good approximation for the cross section. We give a normalized prediction for the cross section by using results from a fit to Belle data on by Uglov et al. Uglov:2016orr . The peak from the triangle singularity is large enough that it could be observable by the BESIII detector.
A pair of spin-1 charm mesons can be produced from the annihilation of into a virtual photon. The Feynman diagram for this process is shown in Fig. 1. We use nonrelativistic normalizations for the charm mesons in the final state. In the center-of-momentum frame, the matrix element has the form
[TABLE]
where is the square of the center-of-mass energy, and are the spinors for the colliding and , and is the matrix element of the electromagnetic current between the QCD vacuum and the state. Near the threshold for producing , the charm-meson pair must be produced in a P-wave state with total spin 0 or 2. The matrix element of the current that creates and with momenta and and with polarization vectors and can be expressed as . The Cartesian tensor is
[TABLE]
where and are amplitudes for creating with total spin 0 and 2, respectively. The cross section for annihilation into near the threshold is
[TABLE]
where is the mass of the and is the relative momentum of the pair.
The Belle collaboration has measured exclusive cross sections for annihilation into several pairs of charm mesons, including Abe:2006fj ; Pakhlova:2008zza . Uglov et al. have analyzed the Belle data using a unitary approach based on a coupled channel model Uglov:2016orr . They included a spin-2 F-wave amplitude for as well as spin-0 and spin-2 P-wave amplitudes. Near the threshold at 4020.5 MeV, the spin-0 and spin-2 P-wave contributions to the cross sections have the behavior in Eq. (4). A fit to the two terms in the cross section in Eq. (4), with replaced by the mass of the and , gives
[TABLE]
These coefficients have natural magnitudes of order . The factor in Eq. (4) is determined more accurately by fitting cross sections than the ratio .
The values of and for in Eq. (5) can be inserted into Eq. (4) to predict the cross section for near the threshold at 4013.7 MeV. This prediction is based on the reasonable assumption that the creation of the charm-meson pair proceeds through the direct coupling of the virtual photon to the charm quark and that the contribution from its direct coupling to the light quark is negligible.
If the is a weakly bound charm-meson molecule, its constituents are the superposition of charm mesons in Eq. (1). The reduced mass of is , where is the mass of the . The mass difference between the and is MeV. The present value of the difference between the mass of the and the energy of the scattering threshold is Tanabashi:2018oca
[TABLE]
If this difference is negative, is a bound state with binding energy and binding momentum . The central value in Eq. (6) corresponds to a charm-meson pair above the scattering threshold. The value lower by corresponds to a bound state with binding energy MeV and binding momentum MeV.
The can be produced in annihilation through the creation of by a virtual photon followed by the rescattering of the charm-meson pair into . The Feynman diagrams for this process are shown in Fig. 2. The vertex for the virtual photon to create and with momenta and and vector indices and is , where the Cartesian tensor is given in Eq. (3). The vertex for the transition of to with a photon of momentum is , where is the vector index of . The transition magnetic moment can be determined from the radiative decay width of Rosner:2013sha : . The binding of or into can be described within an effective field theory called XEFT Fleming:2007rp ; Braaten:2015tga . The vertices for the couplings of to and to can be expressed as , where is the binding momentum of the and and are the vector indices of the spin-1 charm meson and the Braaten:2010mg .
The matrix element for is the sum of the two diagrams in Fig. 2. We use nonrelativistic propagators for the charm mesons. The matrix element for producing and with momenta and and with polarization vectors and can be expressed as
[TABLE]
The current is
[TABLE]
The scalar loop amplitude is a function of the center-of-mass energy relative to the threshold. It can be calculated analytically by integrating over the loop energy using a contour integral around the pole of one propagator, combining the remaining two propagators with a Feynman parameter , integrating over the loop momentum, and finally integrating over :
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
and keV is the predicted width of the Rosner:2013sha . The dependence on is through and the momentum of , which is equal to the energy of the photon and is determined by energy conservation:
[TABLE]
The loop amplitude in Eq. (9) has a triangle singularity in the limit where the binding energy of is 0 and the decay width of the is 0. The singularity arises from the integration region where the three charm mesons whose lines form triangles in the diagrams in Fig. 2 are all on their mass shells simultaneously. The two charm mesons that become constituents of the are both on their mass shells in the limit where the binding energy is 0. There is a specific energy where the spin-1 charm meson that emits the photon can also be on its mass shell. The triangle singularity is a logarithmic divergence of Eq. (9) in the limits and . In these limits, the denominator of the argument of the logarithm is zero at the energy for which . The energy can be obtained by solving this equation for using Eq. (11) for . A simple approximation to the solution for is
[TABLE]
The predicted energy is MeV.
The cross section for annihilation into at center-of-mass energy near the threshold is
[TABLE]
We have used nonrelativistic phase space for and relativistic phase space for the photon. The factor that depends on and differs from by a multiplicative factor that depends on and can range from 0.34 to 1.31.
The cross section for in Eq. (13) near the threshold is shown in Fig. 3 for three values of the binding energy: MeV, 0.17 MeV, and 0.10 MeV. For smaller values of , the line shape becomes sensitive to the unknown decay width of . It is necessary to take into account the imaginary part of , and it becomes increasingly difficult to accomodate the significant branching fraction into Braaten:2007dw . We have chosen the value of that maximizes the normalization factor in the cross section given the value from Eq. (5). The minimum normalization factor is smaller by a factor of 3.8. The cross section has a narrow peak produced by the triangle singularity. The position of the peak, which is insensitive to the binding energy, is 2.2 MeV above the threshold, near the prediction from Eq. (12). The height of the peak is also insensitive to . The full width at half maximum is 5.1 MeV at MeV, and it decreases as decreases. Beyond the peak, the cross section decreases to a local minimum at an energy near 40 MeV, before increasing because of the dependence of the P-wave cross section for producing . The minimum is 0.1 pb for MeV.
The loop amplitude in Eq. (9) has an absorptive contribution that corresponds to annihilation into on-shell charm mesons followed by the rescattering of the charm mesons into . The absorptive contribution to is the imaginary part of Eq. (9) in the limit :
[TABLE]
The absorptive contribution to the cross section, which is obtained by replacing in Eq. (13) by in Eq. (14), is shown in Fig. 3 for three values of . The absorptive contribution is zero below the threshold. For MeV, the position of the peak in the absorptive contribution is 1.3 MeV higher than that of the full cross section. The height of the peak is 58% of that of the full cross section. Thus the absorptive contribution is not a good approximation to the cross section in the triangle singularity region. At larger energies, the absorptive contribution quickly approaches the full cross section.
In the limit , the loop amplitude can be expressed as the momentum integral
[TABLE]
where is the universal momentum-space Schrödinger wavefunction for a weakly-bound S-wave molecule normalized so . In the rest frame, this wavefunction as a function of the relative momentum is
[TABLE]
The wavefunction in the integrand of Eq. (LABEL:eetoXgamma-wfX) is in a moving frame where the bound state has momentum . It has a maximum as function of when the two constituents have equal velocities.
In Ref. Dubynskiy:2006cj , Dubynskiy and Voloshin (DV) calculated the absorptive contribution to the cross section for using a wavefunction that reduces in the rest frame to
[TABLE]
where is an adjustable parameter. The DV wavefunction was used previously by Voloshin in a study of the decays of into Voloshin:2005rt . Voloshin identified the parameter in Eq. (17) with the binding momentum of . This identification can be justified rigorously only in the limit in which the wavefunction reduces to that in Eq. (16). The subtraction in the DV wavefunction in Eq. (17) makes it decrease as when is much larger than the momentum scale . In Ref. Dubynskiy:2006cj , DV illustrated their results using the values MeV and MeV. For the wavefunction in the moving frame, DV used . It has a maximum as function of when the two constituents have equal momenta. Since is close to , the different prescription for the wavefunction in the moving frame has a small effect on the cross section. The subtraction in Eq. (17) also has a small effect in the triangle singularity region.
The BESIII collaboration has measured the cross section for annihilation into at center-of-mass energies ranging from 4.008 GeV to 4.6 GeV by observing in the final states and Ablikim:2013dyn ; Ablikim:2019zio . They did not measure the cross section at energies between 4.009 GeV and 4.178 GeV, which includes the energy 4.016 GeV of the peak from the triangle singularity. The BESIII collaboration measured the cross section in 10 MeV steps between 4.178 GeV and 4.278 GeV Ablikim:2019zio . The largest value of the product of the cross section and the branching fraction into was about 0.5 pb. Upper and lower bounds can be put on the branching fraction Br for the decay of into : Braaten:2019ags . Thus the height of the peak from the triangle singularity at 4.016 GeV could be a significant fraction of the cross section measured in this higher energy region.
Our predictions for the peak from the triangle singularity are based on the assumption that the is a weakly-bound charm meson molecule whose decay width is smaller than its binding energy. If the decay width is larger than the binding energy or if the is instead a virtual state, our assumption that it couples to the charm mesons through a momentum-independent vertex breaks down. This could have a significant effect on the peak. The peak could also be modified if there is a multiple fine tuning of hadronic physics that produces a zero or an additional pole in the scattering amplitude for the charm mesons near threshold.
We have pointed out that a triangle singularity produces a narrow peak in the cross section for annihilation into at an energy about 2.2 MeV above the threshold. We gave a normalized prediction for the cross section in that region. The peak from the triangle singularity is large enough that it could be observable by the BESIII detector. The observation of this peak would provide strong support for the identification of the as a weakly bound charm-meson molecule.
Acknowledgements.
This work was supported in part by the Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-SC0011726, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1607190.
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