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Investigating the role of tetraquark operators in lattice QCD studies of the a0(980) and κ resonances

Andrew D. Hanlon1,*, Daniel Darvish2, Sarah Skinner2, John Meneghini2, Ruairí Brett2, John Bulava3, Jacob Fallica2, Colin Morningstar2, Fernando Romero-López4 et al.

André Walker-Loud5

  • *Contact author: ahanlon7@kent.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014517 – Published 23 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bs45-shv9

Abstract

The role of tetraquark operators in studying the isodoublet strange κ and isovector nonstrange a0(980) scalar mesons in lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is examined using an ensemble with mπ≈230  MeV and spatial extent L such that mπL≈4.4. Hermitian correlation matrices using both single-meson, meson-meson, and tetraquark interpolating operators are used to extract the spectrum of finite-volume stationary states in the appropriate symmetry channels. Hundreds of local and extended tetraquark operators are explored. Determinations of the spectrum in each channel are found to be unreliable without the inclusion of at least one tetraquark operator. For example, the inclusion of tetraquark operators with isospin 1/2 and strangeness 1 quantum numbers reveals the existence of an additional energy level in the Kη subsystem below the Kη threshold. The implications of this on parametrizing the scattering K-matrix through a well-known quantization condition to extract properties of the κ and a0(980) scalar meson resonances are discussed.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014517– Published 23 July, 2026
  • Received 20 March 2026
  • Accepted 12 June 2026
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