Thesis

Pentaquark spectroscopy for the LHC

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2021/1

• Academic Year:

  2021

• Domain:

  Astroparticle Physics

• Supervisor:

  Gernot Eichmann

• Co-Supervisor:

  Teresa Peña

• Institution:

  Instituto Superior Técnico (Universidade de Lisboa)

• Host Institution:

  Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas

• Abstract:

  In the past two decades there has been tremendous progress in the theoretical and experimental investigation of multiquark states, which has expanded our understanding of what a “hadron” is. Experimental evidence suggests that Nature does not only form conventional mesons and baryons but also more exotic combinations such as tetraquarks and pentaquarks. In particular, there is evidence from LHCb for a number of pentaquark states in the charm-quark mass region. The goal of this project is to shed light on the spectrum and internal composition of such five-quark states with functional methods, which amounts to solving nonperturbative five-body equations in QCD using high-performance computing. This will deliver insight on the mass spectrum of pentaquarks, their resonance poles in the complex plane, their internal quark-gluon structure with possible clustering into meson-baryon pairs, and their size whose knowledge is important for future experiments at the LHC and other facilities.