Diffusion Monte Carlo calculations of fully-heavy (multiquark) bound states

TL;DR

This paper employs diffusion Monte Carlo to accurately compute the masses of fully-heavy tetraquark states, providing insights into their stability, structure, and potential experimental signatures, especially in light of recent LHCb observations.

Contribution

It introduces a diffusion Monte Carlo approach to fully-heavy tetraquark calculations, reducing numerical uncertainties and avoiding quark-clustering assumptions, offering more rigorous mass predictions.

Findings

Heavy tetraquark states are above meson-meson thresholds.

The $cc\bar c\bar c$ state aligns with LHCb enhancements.

Certain $cb\bar c\bar b$ states are nearly degenerate and compatible with molecular configurations.

Abstract

We use a diffusion Monte Carlo method to solve the many-body Schr\"odinger equation describing fully-heavy tetraquark systems. This approach allows to reduce the uncertainty of the numerical calculation at the percent level, accounts for multi-particle correlations in the physical observables, and avoids the usual quark-clustering assumed in other theoretical techniques applied to the same problem. The interaction between particles was modeled by the most general and accepted potential, i.e. a pairwise interaction including Coulomb, linear-confining and hyperfine spin-spin terms. This means that, in principle, our analysis should provide some rigorous statements about the mass location of the all-heavy tetraquark ground states, which is particularly timely due to the very recent observation made by the LHCb collaboration of some enhancements in the invariant mass spectra of $J/\psi$-pairs. Our main results are: (i) the $cc\bar c\bar c$, $cc\bar b\bar b$ ($bb\bar c\bar c$) and $bb\bar b \bar b$ lowest-lying states are located well above their corresponding meson-meson thresholds; (ii) the $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ $cc\bar c\bar c$ ground state with preferred quark-antiquark pair configurations is compatible with the enhancement(s) observed by the LHCb collaboration; (iii) our results for the $cc\bar c\bar b$ and $bb\bar c\bar b$ sectors seem to indicate that the $0^+$ and $1^+$ ground states are almost degenerate with the $2^+$ located around $100\,\text{MeV}$ above them; (iv) smaller mass splittings for the $cb\bar c\bar b$ system are predicted, with absolute mass values in reasonable agreement with other theoretical works; (v) the $1^{++}$ $cb\bar c\bar b$ tetraquark ground state lies at its lowest $S$-wave meson-meson threshold and it is compatible with a molecular configuration.