Study of three-flavored heavy dibaryons using lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD to investigate three-flavored heavy dibaryons, finding potential weak binding for $H_{bcs}$ and near-threshold states for others, shedding light on their stability and interactions.

Contribution

First lattice QCD calculation of three-flavored heavy dibaryons, exploring their masses and potential binding energies across various quark flavor combinations.

Findings

No deeply bound states found for most dibaryons.

Potential weakly bound $H_{bcs}$ dibaryon 29±24 MeV below threshold.

Binding strength increases with valence quark mass.

Abstract

We present results of the first lattice QCD calculation of three-flavored heavy dibaryons both in the flavor-symmetric and antisymmetric channels. These dibaryons have spin zero, and are constructed using various possible combinations of quark flavors with at least one of them as the charm or the bottom quark, i.e., namely, $H_c(cudcud), H_b(budbud), H_{bcs}(bcsbcs)$, $H_{csl}(cslcsl), H_{bsl}(bslbsl)$ and $H_{bcl}(bclbcl)$; $l\in u,d$. We compute the ground state masses of these dibaryons and the calculations are performed on three $N_f=2+1+1$ HISQ gauge ensembles of the MILC collaboration, with lattice spacings $a =$ 0.1207, 0.0888 and 0.0582 fm. A relativistic overlap action is employed for the valence light to charm quarks while a non-relativistic-QCD Hamiltonian with improved coefficients is used for the bottom quarks. Unlike the doubly heavy tetraquarks, one and two-flavored heavy dibaryons, for which lattice QCD calculations have predicted deeply bound strong-interactions-stable states, for these $H_c, H_b, H_{csl},H_{bsl}$ dibaryons we do not find any such deeply bound state. However, for $H_{bcs}$, our results indicate the presence of an energy level $29\pm 24$ MeV below the lowest two-baryon threshold, which could be relevant for its future experimental searches. Moreover, we find that the energy difference between the ground state of $H_{bcl}$ and its lowest threshold increases when $m_l>m_s$. Taken together, our findings indicate the possibility of the existence of the $H_{bcs}$ dibaryon while all other physical three-flavored dibaryons are much closer to their thresholds suggesting either they are weakly bound or unbound, resolving which requires further detail study. Our results also point that the binding of a dibaryon configuration becomes stronger with the increase of its valence quark masses which suggests an interesting aspect of strong interactions at multiple scales.