Searching for diquarks in hadrons

TL;DR

This study investigates the internal structure of diquarks within hadrons using a gauge-invariant approach, revealing the size and mass splitting of scalar and vector diquarks at a specific pion mass regime.

Contribution

It introduces a gauge-invariant method to analyze spatial correlations of diquarks inside hadrons, providing new quantitative insights into their sizes and mass differences.

Findings

Scalar diquark size approximately 0.9 fm

Lower bound of 4.1 fm on vector diquark size

Mass splitting consistent with phenomenological predictions

Abstract

Since the early days of QCD, it has been argued that inside hadrons quarks organise into substructures. Among those, popular pictures of various phenomena (including exotica and colour superconductivity) give a prominent role to diquarks, i.e. to colour antitriplet combinations of two quarks. Using a gauge-invariant setup, which combines the diquark with a static quark, we study spatial correlations of the two light quarks inside the diquark. After illustrating the setup, we discuss our first results for both the scalar (``good'') and the spin one (``bad'') diquark channels. In a regime in which $m_{\pi} \simeq 830$ MeV, our data show unambiguously that a scalar diquark forms with a size of $\simeq$ 0.9 fm. For the vector diquark we are able to put a lower bound of 4.1(7) fm on its size. We also investigate the mass splitting between the good and the bad diquark; our findings are compatible with phenomenologically inspired predictions for this quantity.