Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, m π = m K ≃ 714 MeV . Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function.
Source: Physical Review C
DOI: 10.1103/d2hg-h6d4
Authors: John Bulava, M. A. Clark, Arjun S. Gambhir, Andrew D. Hanlon, Ben Hörz, Bálint Joó, Christopher Körber, Ken McElvain, Aaron S. Meyer, Henry Monge-Camacho, Colin Morningstar, Joseph Moscoso, Amy Nicholson, Fernando Romero-López, Ermal Rrapaj, Andrea Shindler, Sarah Skinner, Pavlos M. Vranas, André Walker-Loud
Institutions: Ruhr University Bochum, Nvidia (United Kingdom), Nvidia (United States), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kent State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Intel (United States), University of California, Berkeley, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Bern, RWTH Aachen University
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Office of Science, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, European Research Council, Nuclear Physics, Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
Awards: G1088636562, G121915436, G122673668, G1286236842, G1311044274, G1356433355, G14554683, G1498520027, G1538770391, G1645119126, G1677143136, G1825731507, G1863003419, G1895126726, Unravelling the Origin of the Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry in the Universe, G2014318462, G203625172, G2145270357, G22747034, G2411683797, G2491876798, G275679244, G2812149348, G2821925151, G2917895714, G2988778103, G3023069453, G3083819904, G3177085294, G3669113783, G3685081974, G3945850812, G4017386982, G419881185, G4203148917, G42916606, Hadron-Hadron Interactions and Exotic States using Lattice QCD with the Stochastic LapH Method, G4406401336, G4423657506, G4501827968, G4694431782, G4706283272, G473123490, Beiträge jenseits des Standardmodells zum elektrischen Dipolmoment von Nukleonen, G498139845, G5070048936, G5076365615, G5147047489, G515206079, G5450652958, G574795485, G601061201, G6059744010, G6086734019, Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), G6441358257, Multi-Hadron Interactions using Lattice QCD with the Stochastic LapH Method, G660579501, G6652958823, G6671297155, G675320460, G691578896, G70629815, G7114708214, G7651947074, G8015205945, G8269158468, G8326222658, CAREER: Grounding Nuclear Physics in the Standard Model for New Physics Searches, G8906985441, G895790057, G89955983, G969889393, G975948752, G991281326
OpenAlex ID: W4417267994