The Deuteron and Exotic Two-Body Bound States from Lattice QCD

Abstract

Results of a high-statistics, multi-volume Lattice QCD exploration of the deuteron, the di-neutron, the H-dibaryon, and the Xi-Xi- system at a pion mass of m ~ 390 MeV are presented. Calculations were performed with an anisotropic n_f = 2+1 Clover discretization in four lattice volumes of spatial extent L ~ 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 and 4.0 fm, with a lattice spacing of b_s ~ 0.123 fm in the spatial-direction, and b_t ~ b_s/3.5 in the time-direction. The Xi-Xi- is found to be bound by B_{Xi-Xi-} = 14.0(1.4)(6.7) MeV, consistent with expectations based upon phenomenological models and low-energy effective field theories constrained by nucleon-nucleon and hyperon-nucleon scattering data at the physical light-quark masses. We find weak evidence that both the deuteron and the di-neutron are bound at this pion mass, with binding energies of B_d = 11(05)(12) MeV and B_{nn} = 7.1(5.2)(7.3) MeV, respectively. With an increased number of measurements and a refined analysis, the binding energy of the H-dibaryon is B_H = 13.2(1.8)(4.0) MeV at this pion mass, updating our previous result.