Heavy multiquark systems as clusters of smaller units: A diffusion Monte Carlo calculation

Abstract

Multiquark systems appear less frequently than mesons and baryons despite the enormous worldwide experimental effort that has been made during the last two decades. In this work, we propose a possible explanation for that fact, restricting ourselves to the case of sets including only c and c¯ quarks. We show that those multiquarks can be thought as different combinations of smaller units that associate together to produce colorless assemblies with a definite value of the total spin. For instance, for the cccccc hexaquark with spin S=0, we have three possibilities; a set of six undistinguishable c quarks, an association of two ccc baryons, or a set of three cc diquarks close together. This means we can have three different values for the mass of an open-charm hexaquark with S=0. Using the diffusion Monte Carlo method, we calculate all possible combinations compatible with tetraquark ccc¯c¯, pentaquark ccccc¯, open-charm cccccc, and hidden-charm cccc¯c¯c¯ hexaquark structures with the minimum value of total spin (S=0 or S=1/2). We consider compact structures with radial wave functions including pair interactions between all the quarks in the cluster. We find that, in all cases, the mass of the multiquark decreases with the number of small units that conform the set of quarks. For instance, an open charm hexaquark made up of three diquarks has a smaller mass than a set of six c undistinguishable units. When the pieces that conform the multiquark are themselves colorless with a definite value of the total spin, the cluster splits into those smaller units that separate infinitely from each other. Published by the American Physical Society 2024