Strangeonium-like hybrids on the lattice

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to investigate strangeonium-like hybrids, revealing their masses, wave functions, and potential interpretations, challenging existing models and providing insights into their structure and decay properties.

Contribution

First lattice QCD investigation of strangeonium-like hybrids with detailed mass spectra and wave functions, proposing a color halo picture and analyzing decay mechanisms.

Findings

Ground state $1^{-+}$ mass around 2.1-2.2 GeV

Mass splitting between states exceeds flux-tube model predictions

Wave functions show radial nodal structures indicating a two-body system

Abstract

The strangeonium-like $s\bar{s}g$ hybrids are investigated from lattice QCD in the quenched approximation. In the Coulomb gauge, spatially extended operators are constructed for $1^{--}$ and $(0,1,2)^{-+}$ states with the color octet $s\bar{s}$ component being separated from the chromomagnetic field strength by spatial distances $r$, whose matrix elements between the vacuum and the corresponding states are interpreted as Bethe-Salpeter (BS) wave functions. In each of the $(1,2)^{-+}$ channels, the masses and the BS wave functions are reliably derived. The $1^{-+}$ ground state mass is around 2.1-2.2 GeV, and that of $2^{-+}$ is around 2.3-2.4 GeV, while the masses of the first excited states are roughly 1.4 GeV higher. This mass splitting is much larger than the expectation of the phenomenological flux-tube model or constituent gluon model for hybrids, which is usually a few hundred MeV. The BS wave functions with respect to $r$ show clear radial nodal structures of non-relativistic two-body system, which imply that $r$ is a meaningful dynamical variable for these hybrids and motivate a color halo picture of hybrids that the color octet $s\bar{s}$ is surrounded by gluonic degrees of freedom. In the $1^{--}$ channel, the properties of the lowest two states comply with those of $\phi(1020)$ and $\phi(1680)$. We have not obtained convincing information relevant to $\phi(2170)$ yet, however, we argue that whether $\phi(2170)$ is a conventional $s\bar{s}$ meson or a $s\bar{s}g$ hybrid within the color halo scenario, the ratio of partial decay widths $\Gamma(\phi \eta)$ and $\Gamma (\phi \eta')$ observed by BESIII can be understood by the mechanism of hadronic transition of a strangeonium-like meson along with the $\eta-\eta'$ mixing.