Fully charmed tetraquarks from LHC to FCC: Natural stability from fragmentation

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for predicting the production of fully charmed tetraquarks in high-energy proton collisions, utilizing novel fragmentation functions and advanced factorization techniques to make predictions for current and future colliders.

Contribution

It introduces a new set of collinear fragmentation functions (TQ4Q1.0) for tetraquark production and applies hybrid NLL/NLO$^+$ factorization to predict observables at LHC and FCC energies.

Findings

Predictions for tetraquark production rates at 14 TeV LHC and 100 TeV FCC.

Development of DGLAP-evolving fragmentation functions for tetraquarks.

Application of hybrid factorization with novel tools for high-energy collider observables.

Abstract

We investigate the inclusive production of fully charmed tetraquarks, $T_{4c}(0^{++})$ or $T_{4c}(2^{++})$ radial excitations, in high-energy proton collisions. We build our study upon the collinear fragmentation of a single parton in a variable-flavor number scheme, suited to describe the tetraquark formation mechanism from moderate to large transverse-momentum regimes. To this extent, we derive a novel set of DGLAP-evolving collinear fragmentation functions, named TQ4Q1.0 determinations. They encode initial-scale inputs corresponding to both gluon and heavy-quark fragmentation channels, defined within the context of quark-potential and spin-physics inspired models, respectively. We work within the NLL/NLO$^+$ hybrid factorization and make use of the JETHAD numeric interface along with the symJETHAD symbolic calculation plugin. With these tools, we provide predictions for high-energy observables sensitive to $T_{4c}$ plus jet emissions at center-of-mass energies ranging from 14 TeV at the LHC to the 100 TeV nominal energy of the FCC.