Identifying multiquark hadrons from heavy ion collisions.

Identifying hadronic molecular states and/or hadrons with multiquark components either with or without exotic quantum numbers is a long-standing challenge in hadronic physics. We suggest that studying the production of these hadrons in relativistic heavy ion collisions offers a promising resolution to this problem as yields of exotic hadrons are expected to be strongly affected by their structures. Using the coalescence model for hadron production, we find that, compared to the case of a nonexotic hadron with normal quark numbers, the yield of an exotic hadron is typically an order of magnitude smaller when it is a compact multiquark state and a factor of 2 or more larger when it is a loosely bound hadronic molecule. We further find that some of the newly proposed heavy exotic states could be produced and realistically measured in these experiments.

Exotic hadrons in s-wave chiral dynamics.

We study s-wave scattering of a hadron and a Nambu-Goldstone boson induced by the model-independent low energy interaction in the flavor SU(3) symmetric limit. Establishing the general structure of the interaction based on group theoretical arguments, we find that the interaction in the exotic channels are in most cases repulsive, and that for possible attractive channels the coupling strengths are weak and uniquely given independent of channel. Solving the scattering problem, we show that the attraction in the exotic channels is not strong enough to generate a bound state.