Two-photon decay of fully-charmed tetraquarks from light-by-light scattering at the LHC

Abstract

The LHC newly-discovered resonant structures around 7 GeV, such as the $X(6900)$, could be responsible for the observed excess in light-by-light scattering between 5 and 10 GeV. We show that the ATLAS data for light-by-light scattering may indeed be explained by such a state with the $\gamma \gamma$ branching ratio of order of $10^{-4}$. This is much larger than the value inferred by the vector-meson dominance, but agrees quite well with the tetraquark expectation for the nature of this state. Further light-by-light scattering data in this region, obtained during the ongoing Run-3 and future Run-4 of the LHC, are required to pin down these states in $\gamma\gamma$ channel.