Quarkonium-Nucleus Bound States from Lattice QCD

Understand

Quarkonium-nucleus systems are composed of two interacting hadronic states without common valence quarks, which interact primarily through multi-gluon exchanges, realizing a color van der Waals force.

• We present lattice QCD calculations of the interactions of strange and charm quarkonia with light nuclei.
• Both the strangeonium-nucleus and charmonium-nucleus systems are found to be relatively deeply bound when the masses of the three light quarks are set equal to that of the physical strange quark.
• Extrapolation of these results to the physical light-quark masses suggests that the binding energy of charmonium to nuclear matter is B < 40 MeV.