Stability of the pentaquark in a naive string model

Abstract

The pentaquark is studied in a simple model of confinement where the quarks and the antiquark are linked by flux tubes of minimal cumulated length, and the Coulomb-like interaction, the spin-dependent terms and the antisymmetrization constraints are neglected.. The ground-state is found to be stable against spontaneous dissociation into a meson and a baryon, both in the case of five equal-mass constituents and for a static quark or antiquark surrounded by four equal masses.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, minor corrections, references added, to appear in Phys. Rev. C