Hyperfine interactions of constituent quarks and the mass spectrum of tetraquark states

Abstract

The simplest form of the Hyperfine Interaction (HFI) of quarks is a color-spin interaction, sometimes called Fermi-Breit (FB) HFI. For conventional hadrons, this HFI for quark-antiquark (qq) pairs is twice as strong as the same HFI for quark-quark (qq or qq) pairs, but this difference is absorbed into the different HFI constants for mesons and baryons, which are free parameters of the fits. For tetraquarks, however, qqHFI is only half as strong as the qq/qqHFI and both kinds of pairs coexist within the same state. Hence it is worth investigating a model with different fit constants for qq and qq/q pairs. We have investigated 3 models of spin-color HFI for light scalar tetraquarks: 2 models with single constants for both kinds of pairs and one model with different fit constants. The light scalar nonet is chosen because of a lack of other experimentally observed multiplets interpretable as pure exotic states. Since even the nonet contains only 3 particles with distinct masses (i. e. 3 fit points), the constituent quark masses had to be taken from conventional hadron fits obtained in our previous work. The two-constant model did not prove to be a viable alternative to the one-constant models. © 2019 Author(s).