Analysis of coupled-channel potentials with quark and hadron degrees of freedom

TL;DR

This paper investigates how channel coupling between quark and hadron degrees of freedom modifies effective potentials, revealing non-local, energy-dependent, and complex features including decay effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that eliminating channels induces non-local, energy-dependent, and imaginary components in the effective potentials, advancing understanding of quark-hadron interactions.

Findings

Coupling induces non-local, energy-dependent potentials.

Elimination of hadron channels introduces imaginary parts above thresholds.

Effective potentials reflect decay processes into meson pairs.

Abstract

The quark-antiquark potentials are known to be confining in the absence of the $\bar{q}q$ pair creation. On the other hand, the inter-hadron potentials vanish at large distance, because the interaction range is limited by the inverse pion mass. When the $\bar{q}q$ pair creation and annihilation are switched on, the channel coupling occurs between the quark and hadron degrees of freedom, modifying the behavior of potentials. In this work, we investigate the properties of the effective potentials obtained by eliminating one of the channels. We show that the coupling to the eliminated channel induces a non-local and energy dependent effective potential, irrespective of the properties of the transition potential. In addition, when the hadron channel having continuous scattering eigenstates is eliminated, the resulting inter-quark potential contains an imaginary part above the threshold to describe the decay effect into the meson pair.