Production of exotic tetraquarks QQq¯q¯ in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC

We investigate the production of exotic tetraquarks, $QQ\overline{q}\overline{q}\ensuremath{\equiv}{T}_{QQ}$ ($Q=c$ or $b$ and $q=u$ or $d$), in relativistic heavy-ion collisions using the quark coalescence model. The ${T}_{QQ}$ yield is given by the overlap of the density matrix of the constituents in the emission source with the Wigner function of the produced tetraquark. The tetraquark wave function is obtained from exact solutions of the four-body problem using realistic constituent models. The production yields are typically one order of magnitude smaller than previous estimations based on simplified wave functions for the tetraquarks. We also evaluate the consequences of the partial r…