1. Introduction
The exciting story started in 2014, when the WASA-at-COSY collaboration found a peak in the
fusion reaction that was associated with a
dibaryon [
1], corresponding to a nonstrange
dibaryon, its spin
and isospin
. The binding energy is
, indicating a deeply bound state. Since then, the exploration of other possible dibaryon states has again attracted extensive attention both theoretically and experimentally [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15]. As is well known, the first and the most famous state is the deuteron, which was discovered in 1932 [
16]. It is composed of a proton–neutron system (pn) with
and
. The deuteron is a loosely bound state with a binding energy of only
. After that, no any other possible dibaryons were ever found in experiments for many years till 2014 [
1].
Dibaryon is an important way to study the non-perturbative effect of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is the underlying theory of the strong interaction. Back in 1964, firstly, Gell–Mann proposed the existence of dibaryons [
17]. Since then, many predictions on the existence of possible dibaryon candidates have been found. Triggered by the prediction of the H dibaryon [
18], many other predictions later appeared: the potential model, bag model and string and flux tube models for the dibaryon systems [
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38].
Before 2014, there were actually many theoretical investigations on nonstrange
structure [
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39]; the predicted binding energies ranged from about 10 to
. Among these models, it should be noted that the predictions in [
38,
39] are fairly consistent with the experiments [
1], in which the chiral and extended SU(3) quark models were utilized, and importantly, the effect of the hidden-color channel (CC) is under consideration. We found that the CC channel plays an important role in the binding behavior of the
system.
After 2014, there were also many theoretical studies on the properties of the
state, reporting it as a compact hexaquark, such as the extended Gürsey–Radicati model [
40], the QCD sum rules [
41], Lattice QCD [
11], the quark delocalization color screening model [
42] and the chiral SU(3) quark model [
43,
44,
45].
The extended chiral SU(3) quark model [
46] was proposed based on the chiral SU(3) quark model [
47]. This model is one of the most successful QCD-inspired models. We can reasonably explain the binding energies of baryon ground states, the properties of deuteron, the nucleon–nucleon (NN) and hyperon–nucleon (YN) scattering processes by dynamically solving the resonating group method (RGM) equation. When extending this model to
investigations, no additional parameters are required, and surprisingly, we found that our predictions are in good agreement with an experiment [
1].
Naturally, we would like to extend to some other possible and interesting dibaryon candidates with different strangeness, further exploring the effects from different CC channels.
Here, we would like to add some remarks on our proposed chiral SU(3) and extended chiral SU(3) quark models [
46,
47]. The above two models have been proposed based on the two pioneering works where the quark model made its great leap of being able to describe NN scattering data based on quark degrees of freedom [
48,
49]. It was the first time that the one sigma exchange was considered at the quark level, and hadronic potentials were not used at long range due to the mentioned pioneer works. Therefore, the exchange mechanism from sigma meson is important in our chiral quark models [
46,
47].
As we know, a baryon is composed of three quarks in a quark model, and it is described by a fully antisymmetric wave function including the spatial degree and the internal degrees of freedom, which contain flavor, spin and color parts. The flavor degree of freedom is taken to be the three light flavors of and s. The spin degree of freedom is taken to be the two spin components . The color degree of freedom is taken to be the three colors of and b.
Let us come back to the question of the dibaryon. In a summary work of dibaryon [
31], the authors performed an analysis telling us that two major factors will affect the binding behavior. The first is the symmetry property, and the second is the interactions between quarks, especially the quark chiral field-induced interactions. They used the following matrix element to characterize the symmetry property:
where quarks
and 3 are inside cluster A; quarks
and 6 are inside cluster B; and sfc denotes the operator that acts within the spin-flavor-color space; thus,
denotes how the permutation operator acts in sfc space, and 36 represents the exchange operation between the 3rd and 6th quarks of cluster
and
, respectively. For the baryon-baryon state, the
is important to measure the action of the Pauli principle. It is shown that six interesting candidates belong to
. These systems would be enormously beneficial to form a state due to highly symmetric character of
in orbital space. This is exactly the reason why we decided to study these six dibaryon candidates in the present work.
We have mentioned above that in our works of [
38,
39], the predictions of
structure are very consistent with the recent experiment. This finding is surprising, and more importantly, the CC channel was found to play an important role in this system. It is of interest to investigate the effect from CC channel on different systems. An earlier discussion can be found in [
50,
51], and a later one in [
52,
53,
54,
55], based on group theory. In refs. [
50,
51], the author constructed the CC state by using the expansion coefficients of fractional parentage (cfp) method. Based upon this work, Zongye Zhang derived the relation of symmetry basis and physical basis for the
system, in which she found a new method to construct the CC state. In her method, the complicated calculations in group theory can be avoided, and she constructed the CC wave function and further computed all the sfc matrix elements. Then, these sfc matrix elements were firstly applied into the dynamical calculation for studying the
structure [
38], where the sfc matrix elements are also tabulated. We can see that
, which is consistent with the calculation in [
50], verifying that the constructed CC wave function is correct.
As the theoretical investigation of CC channel on dibaryon system is scarce, in the present work we would like to develop the method proposed by Zongye Zhang for other interesting dibaryon candidates with different strangeness, further exploring the effect of CC channel in the binding behavior of the dibaryon. We systematically investigated the six interesting dibaryon candidates, showing the reader how to obtain the CC wave function and evaluate the needed sfc elements for each candidates. Finally, we performed the dynamical calculations in our chiral SU(3) quark model within the framework of the resonating group method.
The paper is arranged as follows: Firstly, we briefly introduce the chiral SU(3) quark model in
Section 2, and then we discuss the calculated results in the single-channel case in
Section 3, in which we also analyze the symmetry characters of the six systems. An extension to include the CC channel, how to construct the CC wave function and the obtained sfc matrix elements are presented in
Section 4. Finally, we come to the concluding remarks in
Section 5.
5. Conclusions
It is of importance to find a reasonable model to predict the possible dibaryon candidates. The chiral SU(3) quark model is just one of the most successful models, with which we can reasonably explain the experimental binding energies of baryon’s ground state and deuteron, NN and YN scattering processes. By utilizing the same set of model parameters, we predicted the nonstrange dibaryon with a binding energy of , which is consistent with the recent experimental data. We also found that the CC channel plays an important role in forming the bound state.
Naturally, we would like to extend our study to some other interesting systems with different strangeness, due to the theoretical investigations of the CC channel on dibaryon candidates currently being scarce.
- (1)
In the single-channel calculation
According to the symmetry property, we firstly chose six interesting dibaryon candidates with different strangeness. They all belong to . This kind of symmetry property will be most favorable in forming a bound structure, and thus, it is worth further performing the dynamical calculation. Then, we performed the dynamical investigation in the chiral SU(3) quark model by solving the resonating group method equation in the single-channel case. Indeed, the results indicate that all six dibaryon candidates become bound due to the symmetry property, and the interaction mechanism in scalar chiral fields, in particular, the sigma meson exchange, dominates the binding behavior.
- (2)
In the coupled-channel calculation
We extended it to include the CC channel. An easy and systematical method was utilized to work out the CC wave function for all six dibaryon candidates with different strangeness; then, all the sfc matrix elements were evaluated and nicely tabulated. By applying all these computed sfc matrix elements for different dibayon cases, we dynamically solved the corresponding coupled-channel equation for each case in the chiral SU(3)quark model. The calculated results are shown below.
- (a)
For the case, we consider the coupling from the CC channel; thus, the configuration includes (+CC) or (+CC), where there are tensor couplings from both OGE and pseudoscalar chiral field exchanges for each state. For and states, we found that both couplings, the CC coupling and tensor coupling, increment the binding energies by about and , respectively. The results clearly indicate that both states would become bound. The coupling to the CC channel plays an significant role in forming each state.
- (b)
Similarly, for the case, the configuration includes (+CC), (+CC), (+CC), or (+CC), in which there is no tensor coupling for each state. For , , states with different strangeness (0, -1, -5 or -6), the calculated results show that the different CC channels increment by less than the corresponding binding energies. The CC channel has an obvious effect in the formation of each dibaryon candidate.
Due to the theoretical investigations of the effect of the CC channel on each dibaryon candidate being currently scarce, we performed a systematical exploration on the possible and interesting dibaryon candidates with different strangeness. The obtained results are significant for helping us to acquire deeper understanding of the effect from the hidden color channel.
Here it should be mentioned that a quadratic potential for confinement was used in the calculations. Since the CC channel could be sensitive to the confinement potential, we would like to further investigate the linear potential for confinement in the future. Exploring in this direction will be of great interest and significant in helping us to profoundly understand QCD phenomenology.