Quarkonium spectra with magnetically-induced anisotropic confinement

TL;DR

This paper explores how strong magnetic fields induce anisotropic confinement in quarkonium, leading to significant mass shifts and spectrum modifications, which can be tested through lattice simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a quark potential model incorporating lattice-derived anisotropic potentials to study magnetic field effects on quarkonium spectra, revealing novel mass shift behaviors.

Findings

Downward mass shifts along the magnetic field direction.

Greater mass shifts for radially excited states.

Spectrum dependence on magnetic field strength for longitudinal spin states.

Abstract

Strong magnetic fields modify the force that confines quarks inside hadrons and make it direction-dependent. Using quark-antiquark potentials obtained from lattice simulations as inputs to a quark potential model, we investigate how the anisotropic confinement affects the mass spectrum of quarkonium. In the strong-field regime, we find downward mass shifts induced by a softening of the confining potential along the field direction. In particular, the mass shifts of radially excited states are more significant than that of the ground state. For the longitudinal spin eigenstates, the excited-state spectrum strongly depends on the magnetic-field strength, in contrast to the spectrum with conventional isotropic confinement, which is insensitive to the field strength. This provides a clean probe of magnetically induced confinement anisotropy that can be confirmed in future lattice simulations.