arXiv subjects

Sungtae Cho

Publications and source records attributed to Sungtae Cho.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Production of the $\phi$ and $\Omega$ via recombination of jet parton showers in relativistic heavy ion collisions

We study the production of the $\phi(1020)$ and $\Omega(1672)$ in heavy ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.02$ TeV by employing two complementary approaches. In the first approach, the production of the $\phi$ and $\Omega$ is discussed in the coalescence model. In the second approach, we developed a hybrid framework that combines the recombination of shower and thermal partons with remnant string fragmentation. Thermal partons in the quark-gluon plasma are modeled using a blast-wave parameterization, while the phase space information of medium-modified parton showers is generated from Q-PYTHIA, using unquenched jet partons obtained from HIJING initial inputs. We show that both approaches agree well with the experimental measurements, and demonstrate that this hybrid framework provides deeper insight into the underlying strangeness components in the production of $\phi$ and $\Omega$ in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

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arXiv2026

The structure of the $X(3915)$ meson and its production in heavy ion collisions

We study the structure of the $X(3915)$ meson in a quark model and explore how its production in heavy ion collisions depends on its internal structure. We first analyze the $X(3915)$ as a $c\bar{c}s\bar{s}$ state and solve the Hamiltonian with color-spin interactions within the quark model. We find that the ground state of the $c\bar{c}s\bar{s}$ with total spin 0 obtained from the quark model analysis favors a separated $D_s \bar{D}_s$ state. To probe its structure further, we study its production in relativistic heavy ion collisions for various proposed configurations. We calculate the transverse momentum distributions and yields for the $X(3915)$ assuming its structure to be either a charmonium, a tetraquark, or a hadronic molecular state. We argue that by measuring the transverse momentum distributions and yields of the $X(3915)$ produced in heavy ion collisions, one can identify the structure of the $X(3915)$.

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arXiv2026

Exploring bound states and interactions of the nucleon-antinucleon system in a constituent quark model

In this work, we study the nucleon-antinucleon system in a constituent quark model. We first construct the nucleon-antinucleon wave function such that the multiquark and multiantiquark components each satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle, and then investigate the possibility of a bound state using a Hamiltonian that includes color-color, spin-dependent interactions and three-quark potentials. Our results indicate that, in specific channels, the nucleon-antinucleon interaction exhibits significant attraction, suggesting a strong possibility of a bound state.

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arXiv2025

Charm-strange meson production in relativistic heavy ion collisions

We study charm-strange mesons, or $D_s$, $D_s^*$, $D_{s0}^*(2317)$, and $D_{s1}(2460)$ mesons by focusing on their production by coalescence from a quark-gluon plasma in relativistic heavy ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV. Starting from the investigation of the transverse momentum distribution of both charm and strange quarks through transverse momentum distributions of $\phi$ and $D^0$ mesons, we calculate the transverse momentum distributions and yields of $D_s$, $D_s^*$, $D_{s0}^*(2317)$, and $D_{s1}(2460)$ mesons based on the coalescence model. We find that the yield and transverse momentum distribution of the $D_s$ meson agree well with the experimental measurements at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV at LHC. We further evaluate the transverse momentum ratio between $D_s$ and $D^0$ mesons, and investigate the role of light and strange quarks in the production of charmed mesons in heavy ion collisions. Finally, we calculate the transverse momentum distribution and yield of the $D_{s0}^*(2317)$ meson in a four-quark state, and compare to those of $D_{s0}^*(2317)$ meson in a two-quark state.

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arXiv2025

The Electron-Ion Collider as A Prospective Facility for Pentaquark Measurements

The Electron-Ion Collider provides a groundbreaking opportunity to study heavy pentaquarks with unprecedented precision, leveraging its high collision energy and beam spin polarization capabilities. As a representative case, we analyze electroproduction cross sections of Pc (4312) under different spin-parity hypotheses using the vector meson dominance model. To ensure a parameter-free approach and minimize ambiguity, we incorporate results from the LHCb and GlueX experiments. To characterize the spin and the parity of Pc (4312), we propose measuring the beam spin asymmetry and decay kinematic polarization, quantities that can be accurately determined by the ePIC detector. Our approach can be extended to investigate other heavy pentaquarks produced in electron-proton and electron-deuteron collisions, as well as to study their interactions with nuclear matter in electron-heavy ion collisions. We strongly encourage the EIC community to explore this potential and integrate pentaquark studies as a critical element of the scientific mission.

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arXiv2024

The Inevitable Quark Three-Body Force and its Implications for Exotic States

Three-body nuclear forces are essential for explaining the properties of light nuclei with a nucleon number greater than three. Building on insights from nuclear physics, we extract the form of quark three-body interactions and demonstrate that these terms are crucial for extending the quark model fit of the meson spectrum to include baryons using the same parameter set. We then discuss the implications of our findings for exotic configurations involving more than three quarks, such as the $T_{cc}$ and $\chi_{c1}(3872)$. We find that the quark three-body interactions provide additional repulsion on the order of 10 MeV for the compact configurations of both the $T_{cc}$ and $\chi_{c1}(3872)$. This result, combined with previous calculations, strongly suggests that these tetraquark states are molecular rather than compact states.

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arXiv2023

Is $K_{1}/K^{*}$ enhancement in heavy ion collisions a signature of chiral symmetry restoration?

We extend the recent study of $K_{1}/K^{*}$ enhancement as a signature of chiral symmetry restoration in heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) via the kinetic approach to include the effects due to non-unity hadron fugacities during the evolution of produced hadronic matter and the temperature-dependent $K_1$ mass. Although the effect of non-unity fugacity only slightly reduces the $K_1/K^*$ enhancement due to chiral symmetry restoration, the inclusion of the temperature-dependent $K_1$ mass leads to a substantial reduction in the $K_1/K^*$ enhancement. However, the final $K_1/K^*$ ratio in peripheral collisions still shows a more than factor of two enhancement compared to the case without chiral symmetry restoration and thus remains a good signature for chiral symmetry restoration in the hot dense matter produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions.

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arXiv2023

Elliptic and triangular flow of charmonium states in heavy ion collisions

We study the elliptic and triangular flow of charmonium states, or $J/ψ$, $ψ(2S)$, and $χ_c(1P)$ mesons in heavy ion collisions. Starting from the evaluation of charmonia transverse momentum distributions and yields, we calculate elliptic and triangular flow of charmonium states based on the coalescence model. We show that the internal structure, or the wave function distribution of charmonium states plays a significant role, especially when charmonium states are produced by charm quark recombination, leading to the transverse momentum distribution of the $ψ(2S)$ meson as half large as that of the $J/ψ$ meson. We also consider the dependence of the elliptic and triangular flow of charmonium states on internal structures of charmonium states, and find that the wave function effects as well as feed-down contributions are averaged out for elliptic and triangular flow, resulting in similar elliptic and triangular flow for all charmonium states. We investigate further the elliptic and triangular flow of charmonium states at low transverse momentum region, and also discuss the quark number scaling of elliptic and triangular flow for charmonium states.

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arXiv2023

Spin-1 quarkonia in a rotating frame and their spin contents

We propose a new way of studying the spin content of a hadron by looking at its response in a rotating frame. By collecting all responses of quarks and gluons in a rotating frame, we describe the spin-rotation coupling of spin-1 quarkonia and thereby reveal their spin contents in a relativistic formalism. We demonstrate that both the perturbative and non-perturbative contributions in the operator product expansion follow a universal formula that identifies the spin-rotation coupling with unit strength. This allows us to recognize the total spin-1 of the vector and axial vector quarkonia in terms of the total angular momentum of quarks and gluons. Specifically, we find the spin contents of $J/ψ$, $χ_{c1}$, $Υ(1S)$, and $χ_{b1}$ are slightly different from the naive quark model picture. For example, the $J/ψ$ is traditionally considered as an S-wave particle, but we find quarks do not carry all of the total spin.

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arXiv2023

Heavy quarkonium with finite three momentum near $T_c$

We investigate the non-trivial 3-momentum effects on the masses of heavy quarkonium states that are moving in a hot medium using QCD sum rules. For all charmonium states, we observe a negative mass shift near $T_c$ that is less than 3$\%$ at a momentum of 1$\rm{GeV}$. Specifically, we first investigate the difference between the longitudinal and transverse modes of both $J/ψ$ and $χ_{c1}$. We find that the transverse mode of the $J/ψ$ experiences larger modification than the longitudinal mode, while the $χ_{c1}$ has the opposite behavior. By comparing the $η_c$ and $χ_{c0}$, and also the unpolarized $J/ψ$ and $χ_{c1}$, we recognize that the P-wave particles have stronger momentum dependencies on their masses than the S-wave ones. We also find $Υ$(1S) has negligible 3-momentum dependence compared to the charmonium states, e.g. less than 0.01$\%$ even at 1.4$T_c$ and at a momentum of 4$\rm{GeV}$.

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arXiv2022

$X(3872)$ and $T_{cc}$: structures and productions in heavy ion collisions

We argue why the recently observed $T_{cc}$ could either be a compact multiquark configuration or a loosely bound molecular configuration composed of charmed mesons, whereas the $X(3872)$ is most likely a molecular configuration. The argument is based on different short range interactions for these tetraquark states coming from the color-color and color-spin interaction in a quark model, and the presence of a common strong D-wave mixing at larger distance similar to the deuteron case, which for the molecular configurations lead to large sizes. Such an analogy at large distance allows us to calculate the transverse momentum dependence of the loosely bound molecular configuration of tetraquarks produced in heavy ion collisions using the coalescence model that successfully reproduces the deutron data using the proton spectra. The ratio of the integrated $X(3872)$ yield obtained from our method to the $ψ(2S)$ yield obtained from statistical hadronization model method is calculated to be $0.806 \pm 0.234$, which is a factor of 2.47 larger than that obtained by using statistical model predictions for both particles and in line with the data from the CMS experiment. As the previously calculated transverse momentum distribution of the $T_{cc}$ assuming the structure to be a compact multiquark configuration is markedly different, experimental measurements of the transverse distribution of the tetraquark states will discriminate between their two possible structures.

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arXiv2022

Production of $P_{c}$(4312) state in electron-proton collisions

We study the cross sections for the electro-production of $P_c(4312)$ particle, a recently discovered pentaquark state, in electron-proton collisions assuming possible quantum numbers to be $J^{P}=\frac{1}{2}^\pm, \frac{3}{2}^\pm$. $\sqrt{s}$ is set to the energy of the future Electron Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in order to asses the possibility of the measurement in this facility. One can discriminate the spin of $P_c(4312)$ by comparing the pseudorapidity distribution in two different polarization configurations for proton and electron beams. Furthermore, the parity of $P_c(4312)$ can be discerned by analyzing the decay angle in the $P_c \rightarrow p +J/ψ$ channel. As the multiplicity of $P_c$ production in our calculation is large, the EIC can be considered as a future facility for precision measurement of heavy pentaquarks.

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arXiv2021

$K_1/K^*$ enhancement as a signature of chiral symmetry restoration in heavy ion collisions

Based on the fact that the mass difference between the chiral partners is an order parameter of chiral phase transition and that the chiral order parameter reduces substantially at the chemical freeze-out point in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, we argue that the production ratio of $K_1$ over $K^*$ in such collisions should be substantially larger than that predicted in the statistical hadronization model. We further show that while the enhancement effect might be contaminated by the relatively larger decrease of $K_1$ meson than $K^*$ meson during the hadronic phase, the signal will be visible through a systematic study on centrality as the kinetic freeze-out temperature is higher and the hadronic life time shorter in peripheral collisions than in central collisions.

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arXiv2020

Signatures of the vortical quark-gluon plasma in hadron yields

We investigate the hadron production from the vortical quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions. Based on the quark-coalescence and statistical hadronization models, we show that total hadron yields summed over the spin components are enhanced by the local vorticity with quadratic dependence. The enhancement factor amounts to be a few percent and may be detectable within current experimental sensitivities. We also show that the effect is stronger for hadrons with larger spin, and thus propose a new signature of the local vorticity, which may be detected by the yield ratio of distinct hadron species having different spins such as $ϕ$ and $η'$. The vorticity dependence of hadron yields seems robust, with consistent predictions in both of the hadron production mechanisms for reasonable values of the vorticity strength estimated for heavy-ion collisions.

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arXiv2020

Charmed hadron production in an improved quark coalescence model

We study the production of charmed hadrons $D^{0}$ and $Λ_c^+$ in relativistic heavy-ion collisions using an improved quark coalescence model. In particular, we extend the usual coalescence model by letting a produced hadron to have the same velocity as the center-of-mass velocity of coalesced constituent quarks during hadronization to take into account the effect of collective flow in produced quark-gluon plasma. This results in a shift of charmed resonances of higher masses to larger transverse momenta ($p_T^{}$). Requiring all charm quarks of very low $p_T^{}$ to be converted to hadrons via coalescence and letting charm quarks not undergoing coalescence to hadronize by independent fragmentation, we obtain a good description of the measured yield ratio $Λ_c^+/D^0$ as a function of $p_T^{}$ in $\text{Au} + \text{Au}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}^{}=200$~GeV by the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

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arXiv2019

Production of multi-charmed hadrons by recombination in heavy ion collisions

We study the production of multi-charmed hadrons by recombination in heavy ion collisions by focusing on the production of $Ξ_{cc}$, $Ξ_{cc}^*$, $Ω_{scc}$, $Ω_{scc}^*$, $Ω_{ccc}$ baryons and X(3872) mesons. Starting from the estimation of yields for those hadrons at chemical freeze-out in both the statistical and coalescence model, we evaluate their transverse momentum distributions at mid-rapidity in the coalescence model. We show that yields of multi-charmed hadrons in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC are large enough, and thereby not only multi-charmed hadrons observed so far, e.g., the $Ξ_{cc}$ but also those which have not been observed yet, can be discovered sufficiently in heavy ion collisions. We also find that the transverse momentum distribution ratio between various multi-charmed hadrons sensitively reflects the interplay between quark contents of corresponding hadrons as well as the transverse momentum distribution of charm quarks at the hadronization point, and therefore we insist that studying both the transverse momentum distributions of multi-charmed hadrons themselves and transverse momentum distribution ratios between various multi-charmed hadrons provide us with useful information on hadron production mechanism involving charm quarks in heavy ion collisions.

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arXiv2018

Where is the stable Pentaquark

We systematically analyze the flavor color spin structure of the pentaquark $q^4\bar{Q}$ system in a constituent quark model based on the chromomagnetic interaction in both the SU(3) flavor symmetric and SU(3) flavor broken case with and without charm quarks. We show that the originally proposed pentaquark state $\bar{Q}s qqq$ by Gignoux et al and by Lipkin indeed belongs to the most stable pentaquark configuration, but that when charm quark mass correction based on recent experiments are taken into account, a doubly charmed antistrange pentaquark configuration ($udc c \bar{s}$) is perhaps the only flavor exotic configuration that could be stable and realistically searched for at present through the $Λ_c K^+ K^- π^+$ final states. The proposed final state is just reconstructing $K^+$ instead of $π^+$ in the measurement of $Ξ^{++}_{cc} \rightarrow Λ_c K^- π^+ π^+$ reported by LHCb collaboration and hence measurable immediately.

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arXiv2018

Hadronic effects on the $cc\bar{q}\bar{q}$ tetraquark state in relativistic heavy ion collisions

We study the hadronic effects on the $cc\bar{q}\bar{q}$ tetraquark state by focusing on the $T_{cc}(1^+)$ meson during the hadronic stage of relativistic heavy ion collisions. We evaluate the absorption cross section of the $T_{cc}$ meson by pions in the quasi-free approximation, and investigate the time evolution of the $T_{cc}$ abundance in the hadronic medium based on the effective volume and temperature of the hadronic phase at both RHIC and LHC modelled by hydrodynamic calculations with the lattice equation of state. We probe two possible scenarios for the structure of $T_{cc}$, where it is assumed to be either a compact multiquark state or a larger sized molecular configuration composed of DD*. Our numerical results suggest that the hadronic effects on the $T_{cc}$ production is insignificant, and its final abundance depends on the initial yield of $T_{cc}$ produced from the quark-gluon plasma phase, which will depend on the assumed structure of the state.

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