2025/08/13 by Assi, Benoît, Grebe, Anthony, Wagman, Michael · 1 citation
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.10090
Van der Waals potentials describing interactions between color-singlet mesons and/or baryons vanish at leading order in potential nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics (pNRQCD). This result and constraints from Gauss's law are used to prove that weakly-coupled pNRQCD van der Waals potentials in generic non-Abelian gauge theories with only heavy quarks are too weak to form bound states whose color state is a product of color-singlets. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of four, five, and six quarks with equal masses provide numerical evidence that exotic color configurations are higher energy than products of color-singlet hadrons, suggesting that equal-mass fully-heavy tetraquark, pentaquark, and hexaquark bound states do not exist at next-to-leading order in pNRQCD and at all orders in QCD-like theories in which all quark masses are asymptotically large. Mechanisms for generating hadron-hadron bound states are identified, which necessarily involve large quark-mass hierarchies, relativistic effects arising from the presence of sufficiently light quarks, or nonperturbative effects outside the scope of weakly-coupled pNRQCD.