Evolution of genuine states to molecular ones: The $T_{cc}(3875)$ case

Abstract

We address the issue of the compositeness of hadronic states and demonstrate that starting with a genuine state of nonmolecular nature, but which couples to some meson-meson component to be observable in that channel, if that state is blamed for a bound state appearing below the meson-meson threshold it gets dressed with a meson cloud and it becomes pure molecular in the limit case of zero binding. We discuss the issue of the scales, and see that if the genuine state has a mass very close to threshold, the theorem holds, but the molecular probability goes to unity in a very narrow range of energies close to threshold. The conclusion is that the value of the binding does not determine the compositeness of a state. However, in such extreme cases we see that the scattering length gets progressively smaller and the effective range grows indefinitely. In other words, the binding energy does not determine the compositeness of a state, but the additional information of the scattering length and effective range can provide an answer. We also show that the consideration of a direct attractive interaction between the mesons in addition to having a genuine component, increases the compositeness of the state. Explicit calculations are done for the $T_{cc}(3875)$ state, but are easily generalized to any hadronic system.