Substructure of Multiquark Hadrons (Snowmass 2021 White Paper)

2022

In recent years there has been a rapidly growing body of experimental evidence for existence of exotic, multiquark hadrons, i.e. mesons which contain additional quarks, beyond the usual quark-antiquark pair and baryons which consist of more than three quarks. In all cases with robust evidence they contain at least one heavy quark Q=c or b, the majority including two heavy quarks. Two key theoretical questions have been triggered by these discoveries: (a) how are quarks organized inside these multiquark states -- as compact objects with all quarks within one confinement volume, interacting via color forces, perhaps with an important role played by diquarks, or as deuteron-like hadronic molec…