Journal of High Energy Physics (Feb 2024)

Thermal energy of a charm-meson molecule in a pion gas

  • Eric Braaten,
  • Li-Ping He,
  • Kevin Ingles,
  • Jun Jiang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2024)163
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2024, no. 2
pp. 1 – 41

Abstract

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Abstract The thermal corrections to the propagator of a loosely bound charm-meson molecule in a pion gas are calculated to next-to-leading order in the heavy-meson expansion using a zero-range effective field theory. Ultraviolet divergences in the charm-meson-pair self energy are canceled by corrections to the charm-meson-pair contact vertex. Terms that are singular at the charm-meson-pair threshold can be absorbed into thermal corrections to the rest energies and kinetic masses of the charm-meson constituents. The remaining terms reduce to a thermal correction to the binding momentum that is proportional to the pion number density and suppressed by the pion/charm-meson mass ratio. The correction gives a tiny decrease in the binding energy of the charm-meson molecule relative to the charm-meson-pair threshold in the pion gas and a change in its thermal width that is small compared to the thermal widths of the charm-meson constituents. These results are encouraging for the prospects of observing X(3872) and T cc + 3875 $$ {T}_{cc}^{+}(3875) $$ in the expanding hadron gas produced by heavy-ion collisions.

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