No Arabic abstract
We recall and update, both theoretically and phenomenologically, our (nearly) forty-years-old proposal of a string-junction as a necessary complement to the conventional classification of hadrons based just on their quark-antiquark constituents. In that proposal single (though in general metastable) hadronic states are associated with irreducible gauge-invariant operators consisting of Wilson lines (visualized as strings of color flux tubes) that may either end on a quark or an antiquark, or annihilate in triplets at a junction $J$ or an anti-junction $bar{J}$. For the junction-free sector (ordinary $q, bar{q}$ mesons and glueballs) the picture is supported by large-$N$ (number of colors) considerations as well as by a lattice strong-coupling expansion. Both imply the famous OZI rule suppressing quark-antiquark annihilation diagrams. For hadrons with $J$ and/or $bar{J}$ constituents the same expansions support our proposal, including its generalization of the OZI rule to the suppression of $J-bar{J}$ annihilation diagrams. Such a rule implies that hadrons with junctions are mesophobic and thus unusually narrow if they are below threshold for decaying into as many baryons as their total number of junctions (two for a tetraquark, three for a pentaquark). Experimental support for our claim, based on the observation that narrow multiquark states typically lie below (well above) the relevant baryonic (mesonic) thresholds, will be presented.
Why do we see certain types of strongly interacting elementary particles and not others? This question was posed over 50 years ago in the context of the quark model. M. Gell-Mann and G. Zweig proposed that the known mesons were $q bar q$ and baryons $qqq$, with quarks known at the time $u$ (up), $d$ (down), and $s$ (strange) having charges (2/3,-1/3,-1/3). Mesons and baryons would then have integral charges. Mesons such as $qq bar q bar q$ and baryons such as $qqqq bar q$ would also have integral charges. Why werent they seen? They have now been seen, but only with additional heavy quarks and under conditions which tell us a lot about the strong interactions and how they manifest themselves. The present article describes recent progress in our understanding of such exotic mesons and baryons.
A number of candidate multiquark hadrons, i.e., particle resonances with substructures that are more complex than the quark-antiquark mesons and three-quark baryons that are prescribed in the textbooks, have recently been observed. In this talk I present: some recent preliminary BESIII results on the near-threshold behavior of sigma(e+e- --> Lambda Lambda-bar) that may or may not be related to multiquark mesons in the light- and strange-quark sectors; results from Belle and LHCb on the electrically charged, charmoniumlike Z(4430)^+ --> pi^+ psi resonance that necessarily has a four-quark substructure; and the recent LHCb discovery of the P_c(4380) and P_c(4450) hidden-charm resonances seen as a complex structure in the J/psi p invariant mass distribution for Lambda_b --> K^-J/psi p decays and necessarily have a five-quark substructure and are, therefore, prominent candidates for pentaquark baryons.
It was recently shown that in warped compactifications based on a Klebanov-Strassler throat there is a light complex structure field, governing the size of the throat and the redshift at its tip. We show that after uplift of the cosmological constant by an anti-D3 brane at the tip of the throat, the contribution to supersymmetry breaking coming from the new light field is large. We work out the mass scales, in particular the condition for this field to be heavier than the Kahler modulus. We check that for the range of parameters relevant for the destabilization we find agreement with de Sitter swampland conjecture. Adding matter fields on distant branes, we discuss the effects on supersymmetry breaking in the observable sector. A hierarchically small scale of supersymmetry breaking translates generically into large values of localized D3 charges in the manifold.
We use a diffusion Monte Carlo method to solve the many-body Schrodinger equation describing fully-heavy tetraquark systems. This approach allows to reduce the uncertainty of the numerical calculation at the percent level, accounts for multi-particle correlations in the physical observables, and avoids the usual quark-clustering assumed in other theoretical techniques applied to the same problem. The interaction between particles was modeled by the most general and accepted potential, i.e. a pairwise interaction including Coulomb, linear-confining and hyperfine spin-spin terms. This means that, in principle, our analysis should provide some rigorous statements about the mass location of the all-heavy tetraquark ground states, which is particularly timely due to the very recent observation made by the LHCb collaboration of some enhancements in the invariant mass spectra of $J/psi$-pairs. Our main results are: (i) the $ccbar cbar c$, $ccbar bbar b$ ($bbbar cbar c$) and $bbbar b bar b$ lowest-lying states are located well above their corresponding meson-meson thresholds; (ii) the $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ $ccbar cbar c$ ground state with preferred quark-antiquark pair configurations is compatible with the enhancement(s) observed by the LHCb collaboration; (iii) our results for the $ccbar cbar b$ and $bbbar cbar b$ sectors seem to indicate that the $0^+$ and $1^+$ ground states are almost degenerate with the $2^+$ located around $100,text{MeV}$ above them; (iv) smaller mass splittings for the $cbbar cbar b$ system are predicted, with absolute mass values in reasonable agreement with other theoretical works; (v) the $1^{++}$ $cbbar cbar b$ tetraquark ground state lies at its lowest $S$-wave meson-meson threshold and it is compatible with a molecular configuration.
The successful precision measurement of the rate of muon capture on a proton by the MuCap Collaboration allows for a stringent test of the current theoretical understanding of this process. Chiral perturbation theory, which is a low-energy effective field theory that preserves the symmetries and the pattern of symmetry breaking in the underlying theory of QCD, offers a systematic framework for describing $mu p$ capture and provides a basic test of QCD at the hadronic level. We describe how this effective theory with no free parameters reproduces the measured capture rate. A recent study has addressed new sources of uncertainties that were not considered in the previous works, and we review to what extent these uncertainties are now under control. Finally, the rationale for studying muon capture on the deuteron and some recent theoretical developments regarding this process are discussed.