To bind or not to bind: The H-dibaryon in light of chiral effective field theory

Abstract

We analyse the quark mass dependence of the binding energy of the H-dibaryon in the framework of chiral effective field theory. We show that the SU(3) breaking effects induced by the differences of the pertinent two-baryon thresholds (Lambda-Lambda, Xi-N, Sigma-Sigma) have a very pronounced impact that need to be incorporated properly in future lattice QCD simulations. We also point out that if the H-dibaryon is a two-baryon bound state, its dominant component is Xi-N rather than Lambda-Lambda, which is a consequence of the approximate SU(3) flavor symmetry of the two-baryon interactions.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures; Results updated to the new H binding energy reported by NPLQCD, conclusions remain unchanged, several references added