Multiquark Hadrons - A New Facet of QCD

Abstract

I review some selected aspects of the phenomenology of multiquark states discovered in high energy experiments. They have four valence quarks (called tetraquarks) and two of them are found to have five valence quarks (called pentaquarks), extending the conventional hadron spectrum which consists of quark-antiquark $(q\bar{q})$ mesons and $qqq$ baryons. Multiquark states represent a new facet of QCD and their dynamics is both challenging and currently poorly understood. I discuss various approaches put forward to accommodate them, with emphasis on the diquark model.

Comments: 27 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables, to be published in the proceedings of the 14th. Regional Conference on Mathematical Physics, Nov. 9-14, 2015, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan