Studies of Charmonium-like States at BESIII

Abstract

In the quark model, hadrons are dominantly bound states of quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) or three quarks (baryons), but QCD also allows hadronic states to be composed of more quarks bound together. Recently, BESIII, Belle and LHCb have confirmed the existence of four-quark and pentaquark candidates. These new states, along with experimentally observed resonances that do not fit well into the charmonium and bottomonium spectra, present challenges and opportunities for strong interaction theory. In this talk, I will review results on charmonium-like exotic quark states that have been observed by the BESIII experiment at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II (BEPCII).