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Hidden heavy flavor tetraquarks in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation

Bowen Kang, Xi Xia, and Tao Guo*

  • *Contact author: guot17@tsinghua.org.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 111, 114016 – Published 17 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xnbg-wklj

Abstract

The Born-Oppenheimer approximation is one of the very successful tools for solving the hydrogen atom problem. The experimental discovery of hidden heavy flavor tetraquarks QQ¯qq¯ (Q=c, b and q=u, d, s) provides great possibilities for the hydrogen-bond-like structure of the quantum chromodynamics version. In this work, considering that the colors of QQ¯ and qq¯ are both 8, the tetraquark QQ¯qq¯ system is formed by color coupling 8⊗8→1. In order to study the mass splitting caused by the color-spin hyperfine interaction, the color-spin basis vectors of the S-wave tetraquark states are appropriately constructed. Then, we use the Born-Oppenheimer approximation to calculate the mass spectra of the S-wave hidden heavy flavor tetraquark states. The results show that some of the hidden heavy flavor exotic hadrons discovered experimentally can be well explained as this type of hydrogen-bond-like tetraquark structure. In addition, some candidates for tetraquark bound states are predicted and may be compact tetraquark states.

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Phys. Rev. D 111, 114016– Published 17 June, 2025
  • Received 8 April 2025
  • Accepted 22 May 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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