[Submitted on 13 Aug 2025] (cross-list from hep-ph)
Baryon-baryon, meson-meson, and meson-baryon interactions in nonrelativistic QCD
Benoît Assi🇺🇸 · Anthony Grebe🇺🇸 · Michael Wagman🇺🇸
Van der Waals potentials describing interactions between color-singlet mesons and/or baryons vanish at leading order in potential nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics (pNRQCD). This result and constraints from Gauss's law are used to prove that weakly-coupled pNRQCD van der Waals potentials in generic non-Abelian gauge theories with only heavy quarks are too weak to form bound states whose color state is a product of color-singlets. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of four, five, and six quarks with equal masses provide numerical evidence that exotic color configurations are higher energy than products of color-singlet hadrons, suggesting that equal-mass fully-heavy tetraquark, pentaquark, and hexaquark bound states do not exist at next-to-leading order in pNRQCD and at all orders in QCD-like theories in which all quark masses are asymptotically large. Mechanisms for generating hadron-hadron bound states are identified, which necessarily involve large quark-mass hierarchies, relativistic effects arising from the presence of sufficiently light quarks, or nonperturbative effects outside the scope of weakly-coupled pNRQCD.
- Comments:
- 23 pages, 6 figures. Journal version. Discussion expanded and minor corrections
- Subjects:
- High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics — Lattice (hep-lat); High Energy Physics — Theory (hep-th); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
- arXiv:
- 2508.10090 [pdf]