Isospin-violating strong decays of scalar single-heavy tetraquarks

Abstract

We present a study of the isospin-violating one-pion strong decays of single heavy tetraquarks $X_Q = X(s q \bar q \bar Q)$, $Q=c, b$, and $q=u, d$ with spin-parity $J^P = 0^+$. We assume that the tetraquarks have the configuration of a color diquark and a antidiquark. Three mechanisms of isospin violation can contribute to the decay rate: (1) mixing of the $X(s u \bar u \bar Q)$ and $X(s d \bar d \bar Q)$ tetraquark currents, (2) an explicit $m_d-m_u$ quark mass difference in the quark diagrams describing the corresponding decay transitions and (3) $\pi^0-\eta$ mixing in the final state. Our main results are: (1) It is quite likely that the investigated tetraquark states are isosinglet states with a small admixture of an isotriplet component; (2) The first isospin-breaking mechanism affects the decay rater more significantly than the others; (3) Our calculations contain a size parameter $\Lambda_{X_Q}$, characterizing the distribution of the quarks in the tetraquark state $X_Q$. Absolute decay rates depend very much on the choice of $\Lambda_{X_Q}$, varied from 1 to 2 GeV, reflecting the compactness of the multiquark system.