1. Introduction
The concept of multiquark states composed of more then three quarks hypothesized decades ago [
1] was for the first time confirmed in 2003 where multiquark state candidates were measured by the BES [
2], BaBar [
3], and Belle [
4] experiments. The latter observation, seen in the
invariant mass spectrum, was the first observation of a charmonium-like state
, which did not fit expectations of existing quark models for any conventional hadronic particle. The reason was mainly its measured mass 3872 MeV, not predicted by models, and also the difficulty in interpreting it as an excited charmonium
: its eventual decay into
is strongly suppressed because of isospin violation. In the following years, other heavy quarkonium-like states
X,
Y,
Z were discovered, where
Y usually denotes electrically neutral exotic (i.e., non-
) charmonia having quantum numbers
,
Z is used for charged states, and
X labels any non-
Y and non-
Z cases. With the aim to report on the results and achievements of the confined covariant quark model, we narrow our review of experimental outcomes to a relevant subset of the whole exotic meson family.
The first observation of the
mentioned in the previous paragraph was later confirmed in the
collisions by the CDF [
5] and D0 [
6] experiments in 2004, by the LHCb experiment [
7] in 2011, and also by the BESIIIcollaboration [
8] in 2014. Further experimental investigations [
9,
10,
11,
12] increased the mass measurement precision, established the quantum numbers, and put limits on several decay related observables. As of now [
13],
is a particle with the mass
MeV, width
MeV, and quantum numbers
, mostly decaying to
.
Charmonium-like state
was for the first time observed by the BaBar experiment [
14] in 2005 in the
mass distribution. Its existence was further confirmed by the CLEO [
15] (2006), Belle [
16] (2007), and BESII [
17] (2013) collaborations. Later investigations by BaBar [
18] and BESIII [
19] provided further updates on the mass and width parameters. With mass above the
threshold, the
was also searched for in the open charm decay channels, however with negative results [
20,
21,
22,
23,
24]. The
is [
13] an
state with the mass and width
MeV,
MeV.
The study of the
decay channel
by BESII [
17] and Belle [
25] in 2013 led to the discovery of the charged
resonance in the invariant mass distribution of
. The
particle was in the same year observed also by the CLEO-c detector [
26]. In addition, the latter experiment provided the first evidence of the neutral member of the
isotriplet, the
state, discovered in the
channel. A state
was seen in the
spectrum of the
reaction at BESIII in 2014 [
27]. Assuming it can be identified with the
particle, the measurement provided arguments in favor of
quantum numbers. The same experiment reaffirmed in 2015 the existence of the neutral
state [
28], in 2017 confirmed with high significance the
assignment [
29], and in 2019 provided the evidence for the
decay channel [
30]. The D0 collaboration published the observation of the
state in
collision data in 2018 [
31] and studied its mass and width in [
32] (2019). The current
parameters are [
13]
MeV,
MeV and
.
as a charmonium-like state with an electric charge is a prominent candidate for an exotic multiquark state and is largely discussed in the existing literature.
Two narrow bottomonium-like four quark state candidates were detected in the Belle detector [
33] in 2012. They were labeled
and
and were observed as peaks in the mass spectra of
and
. The same experiment published two other papers dedicated to these exotics. In [
34], the evidence was given for the quantum number assignment
for both of the states. In [
35], they were observed in different decay channels
and
, where one can notice the proximity of the two states to the corresponding
thresholds. These decays dominated the studied final states, which besides two bottom mesons, included also a pion and for which the Born cross-section was given. The decay into
was found to be suppressed with respect to the two previous final states, and an upper limit was given. The masses and widths are
= 10,607.2 ± 2.0 MeV,
= 10,652.2 ± 1.5 MeV,
, and
.
Growing evidence suggests that the mentioned and also other, unmentioned exotic heavy quarkonium-like states observed since 2003 cannot be described as simple hadrons in the usual quark model. The effort to understand their nature combined with the non-applicability of the perturbative approach in the low energy domain of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) resulted in a large number of more or less model dependent strategies. In existing reviews [
36,
37,
38,
39,
40,
41,
42,
43,
44,
45,
46,
47,
48,
49], different ideas are analyzed. The proximity of the
masses to meson pair thresholds naturally leads to a popular concept of the hadronic molecule, more closely reviewed in different contexts. In [
50], the authors studied the implications of the heavy quark flavor symmetry on molecular states. The authors of [
51] argued in favor of a molecular picture using an isospin-exchange model, and a nice review of the molecular approach was given in [
52]. A frequent treatment of four quark states is represented also by QCD sum rules [
53,
54,
55] and different quark models. A dynamical approach based on a relativistic quark model with a diquark-antidiquark assumption was proposed in [
56,
57], where tetraquark masses were computed. A non-relativistic screened potential model, presented in [
58], was used to compute the masses, electromagnetic decays, and E1 transitions of charmonium states. Treatment of tetraquarks as compact dynamical diquark-antidiquark systems in [
59] had the ambition to explain why some of the exotic states preferred to decay into excited charmonia. Several hypotheses (molecular description, tetraquark description, hadro-charmonium picture) for different exotic states were investigated in [
60] using tools based on the heavy quark spin symmetry: besides drawing conclusions for some XYZparticles, also possible discovery channels were given. The hybrid and tetraquark interpretation for several exotic states were discussed in paper [
61] using the Born–Oppenheimer approximation. A very complete review of exotic states with some emphasis on the chromomagnetic interaction was provided in a recent publication [
62]. The ideas of coupled channels ([
63]) and heavy quark limit ([
64]) are also often seen in the context of the exotic quarkonia. Finally, one has to mention the possibility of peaks in invariant mass distributions being explained by the kinematic effect. This was investigated in detail in a recent text [
65]. The arguments for
X,
Y, and
Z states not being purely kinematic effects were given in [
66].
In the present paper, we want to review the description of the exotic heavy quarkonia-like states by the confined covariant quark model (CCQM). The model [
67,
68,
69] was proposed and developed as a practical and reliable tool for the theoretical description of exclusive reactions involving the mesons, baryons, and other multiquark states. It was based on a non-local interaction Lagrangian, which introduces a coupling between a hadron and its constituent quarks. The Lagrangian guarantees a full frame independence and the computations relay on standard quantum field theory techniques where matrix elements are given by the set of quark-loop Feynman diagrams according to the
expansion. Earlier, a confinement was not implemented in the model, and thus, it was not suited for heavy particles (with baryon mass exceeding those of the constituent quarks summed). This was changed in [
69], where a smart cutoff was introduced for integration over the space of Schwinger parameters. Since then, arbitrary heavy hadrons could be treated by the CCQM. The CCQM represents a framework where the hadron and the quarks coexist, which raises questions about the proper description of bound states and the double counting. They are solved using a so-called compositeness condition. It guarantees, by setting the hadron renormalization constant
to zero, that the dressed state and the bare one have a vanishing overlap. In order to describe radiative decays, one also needs to introduce gauge fields properly in a non-local theory such as CCQM. This was done by the formalism developed in [
70] where the path integral of gauge field appeared in the quark-field transformation exponential. One should also mention that the model had no gluons: their dynamics was effectively taken into account by the quark-hadron vertex functions, which depended on one hadron size related parameter. The model has a limited number of free parameters; besides the hadron related ones, it has six “global” parameters: five constituent quark masses and one universal cutoff. The model was applied to with success light and heavy mesons and baryons (e.g., [
71,
72,
73,
74,
75,
76]) and also to exotic four quark states [
77,
78,
79,
80,
81,
82,
83]. The latter will be reviewed in the rest of this article.
All sketched features of the CCQM (interaction Lagrangian, confinement, compositeness condition, implementation of electromagnetic interaction) are addressed in more detail in
Section 2.
Section 3 is dedicated to the
state and its decays to
and
. Its radiative decays are analyzed in
Section 4. In
Section 5, molecular and tetraquark hypotheses for the nature of
are put in place and the results compared with experimental data. The exotic to exotic reaction
and the decay of
to open charm are presented in
Section 6. Decays of the bottomonium-like states
and
to several different final states are studied within the molecular picture in
Section 7. We close the text by a summary and conclusion given in
Section 8.
4. Radiative Decays of
The first experimental evidence for the radiative decay of the
particle was given in [
129] by the Belle experiment. From the measured branching fraction product:
the partial width ratio was deduced:
This finding was supported by the BaBar observation [
137]:
which had a limited significance of
. The same experiment reaffirmed the observation in 2009 [
138] with smaller errors:
from which one can deduce [
36]:
BaBar also presented a result related to
:
In 2011, the Belle collaboration published measurements with
and
in the final state [
139]:
The first result was in good agreement with the previous one from the same experiment (36); however, the second number brought some tension when compared to BaBar and a later LHCb measurement [
140]:
The theoretical study of radiative
decays includes several different approaches. Such decays were analyzed in [
98] in the charmonium picture. The authors studied excited 1D and 2P states and their decays in relation with the electric dipole radiation and provided implications for quantum number assignments. The molecular hypothesis was considered in [
106]. There, the authors argued that the validity of the molecular picture could be determined from the study of several
decay channels (including some with the photon emission). The work in [
141] was dedicated to radiative decays with two
D mesons in the final state. It was claimed that the discrimination between the molecular and charmonium picture could be obtained via analysis of the photon spectrum. Several decay modes, which also included
, were examined in [
142] within a phenomenological Lagrangian approach. The predicted value of the radiative decay width depended on the model parameters and varied from 125 KeV to 250 KeV. In [
143],
was described as a mixture of charmonium and exotic molecular states and treated using QCD sum rules. The predicted radiative decay width ratio
was in agreement with experimental measurements. The excited charmonium hypothesis and study of E1 decay widths within the relativistic Salpeter method was presented in [
144]. A description based on a charmonium-like picture with high spin
using a light front quark model was proposed in [
145]. Later works [
146,
147,
148,
149] were mostly interested in the puzzling
ratio (43) and analyzed it with different approaches (quark potential model, single-channel approximation, coupled-channel approach, charmonium-molecule hybrid model, and an effective theory framework).
Here, we focus on the
decay channel, which was studied using the CCQM in [
79]. The non-local quark current for the
hadron was given in the previous section; see Equation (22). The
quark current is written as:
The related size parameter was established in earlier works and has the value of
. The knowledge of the quark currents enables us to give more details concerning the interaction with photons, addressed before in
Section 2.4. The second part of the electromagnetic interaction Lagrangian stands:
where
and
correspond to the parts of usual currents (22), (44) not containing the vertex function. In order to make use of the definition (15), it is convenient to switch to the Fourier transforms of the vertex functions and quark fields:
so that the differential operator can be placed in front of the path integrals:
where the long derivatives are defined as
and
,
with
being combinations of the integration four-vectors
and mass parameters
and
. Next, the identity involving the operator function action on the path integral [
150] is applied:
Its validity extends to all functions
F analytic at zero. The result for
reads:
For
, one obtains:
The amplitude evaluation requires evaluation of four Feynman diagrams displayed in
Figure 5.
The corresponding expression stands:
where
can be expanded in terms of appropriate Lorentz structures. Using the on-mass shell condition, gauge invariance, and Schouten identities [
151], one can show that only two independent structures remain:
The functions
are to be extracted from the expression following from the CCQM computation:
where the separate contributions are written down:
One evaluates the traces and the loop momenta integrals, and the expression is re-arranged in two terms following the mentioned Lorentz structure. The behavior of coefficient functions
is predicted using a numerical integration over the Schwinger parameters:
The decay width is expressed as:
where
denote the helicity amplitudes:
with
. The dependence of the predicted decay width on the size parameter
is shown in
Figure 6.
If we follow the approach from the previous section and take
, then the model predicts:
which is to be compared with the experimental results Equation (
37) and Equation (
40). One may conclude that the bound-tetraquark description of the
state by the CCQM is in an agreement with the experimental observations.
5. Nature of
As stated in the Introduction, the detected
decays include both the
and
final states (assuming
and
are the same particle). The ratio of the decay widths of these two channels was measured by BESIII [
27]:
and represents a quantitative observation to be explained by the theorists. There are many different theoretical approaches that are trying to understand the nature of this state.
The tetraquark interpretation was intensively discussed within QCD sum rules [
152,
153,
154] and also in the color flux-tube model [
155]. The molecular scenario seems to be more abundant in the literature and is discussed or preferred in several theoretical frameworks. A light front theory description was presented in [
156]; an effective field theory description was proposed in [
157]; and QCD sum rules were used in [
158,
159]. The molecular interpretation was also supported by the quark model developed in [
160]. The authors of [
161] made a proposal for BESIII and forthcoming Belle II measurements by using also the molecular scenario. Further molecular picture oriented works can be found in [
162] (constituent quark model, coupled channels) and in [
163] (quark interchange model). It is interesting to note that most of the lattice QCD based studies obtained different results from previous ones: some did not see (within the approach they used) a bound state at all [
164,
165,
166,
167], invoked a threshold cusp explanation [
168,
169], or indicated that the understanding of
within the lattice QCD was only approaching [
170]. For completeness, one can mention the charmonium hybrid interpretation studied in [
171], the hadro charmonium picture presented in [
172] with the tetraquark and molecular interpretation and the color magnetic interaction [
173]. Further ideas can be found in [
174,
175,
176,
177,
178,
179,
180,
181,
182,
183,
184].
The description of
in the framework of the CCQM was presented in [
80]. Two options were tested: the molecular interpretation and the tetraquark hypothesis. For each option, the strong decays into
,
,
, and
were computed and compared to available experimental data. First, we investigate the tetraquark hypothesis. In this scenario, the non-local
current is written as:
The tetraquark mass operator looks like:
where the momenta are defined by:
The matrix elements of the decays
and
are written down:
where the argument of the
-vertex function is given by:
The notations used are as follows:
,
,
,
,
, and
.
The amplitudes of the
and
decays are:
with the argument of the
-vertex function being:
Now, the notation used is
,
,
,
,
, and
.
The decay width for the
transition is given by:
where
H denotes the helicity amplitudes and
is the three-momentum of the final state vector particle
. The helicity amplitudes can be related to the invariant amplitudes
and
, which parametrize the matrix element in terms of the Lorentz structures:
by means of the relations:
From the comparison of Equation (64) with Equations (58)–(61), one can express
as a function of
. The results are importantly influenced by the fact that the amplitudes
and
(Formulas (60) and (61)) vanish exactly within the CCQM description
, and the contributions from the non-zero
B amplitudes are strongly suppressed by the
factor. Before arriving at the numerical predictions, the size parameters need to be specified, and a strategy with respect to the choice of
value has to be settled. The numerical values of the size parameters were in [
80] (i.e., the herein presented
analysis) re-adjusted with respect to those in [
78] and are shown in
Table 3.
As concerns the
parameter, first, it is taken as
GeV to make the predicted value of the decay width
close to the one from [
152,
176]. One obtains:
These outputs contradict the experimental number (see Equation (
55)), which indicates a larger coupling to
than to the
mode. If trying to adjust the
parameter to a more realistic value, the results do not become any better. Assuming
, one gets:
These predictions suggest that the tetraquark picture is not appropriate for the
state.
The molecular description of
appears as a natural alternative. In such a scenario, the non-local interpolation quark current is written as [
53]:
By using similar steps as in the tetraquark analysis, one writes down the Fourier transformed
mass operator in the form:
in order to pin down the
dependence of the coupling
. Next, the transition amplitudes are constructed:
where the argument of the function
is given by:
The meaning of all other letters and symbols is the same as was in the previous paragraph dedicated to the tetraquark description. The decay widths are also evaluated in a fully analogous way. However, the parameter
needs to be adjusted independently. Tuning its value in such a way so as to provide the best description of the BESIII measurement [
27], one gets
GeV with the following values for the decay widths:
One can see that the obtained results at this time are in agreement with the experimental observations by showing an enhancement of the
sector and are in agreement with the observed branching fraction ratio in Equation (
55) within the errors. One can conclude that the CCQM supports the molecular picture of the
state.
6. The Nature of
The distinctive characteristics of the are its mass, which does not fit any charmonium in the same mass region, the suppression of open charm decays with respect to the final state, and the appearance of the exotic charmonium among its decay products. This interesting mix of properties is addressed in quite a few theoretical works, and like in other cases, the molecular, tetraquark, and several other explanations are invoked.
A support for the molecular picture was provided by the QCD lattice computations in [
185], by QCD sum rules in [
186], by a meson exchange model in [
187], and also by the authors of [
188], which favored it over the hadro-charmonium interpretation. Further arguments for
being a molecule were based on the line shape study in [
189], and the authors of [
190] proposed an unconventional state with a large, but not completely dominant molecular component. An interesting paper [
191] came up with a baryonic molecule concept, and the molecular hypothesis was also analyzed in [
192,
193,
194,
195].
On the contrary, the molecular scenario is strongly disfavored in [
196] because of reasons related to the heavy quark spin symmetry and the molecular scenario was rejected in [
197] in favor of a charmonium hybrid one. Here, the crux of the argument lies in an important separation between
mass and its decay threshold. Further arguments to support the charmonium or hybrid-charmonium picture were given in the publications [
198,
199,
200].
One should also mention different quark models [
201,
202,
203,
204] with some of them favoring the tetraquark description of
. The tetraquark hypothesis was also analyzed in the QCD sum rules study [
205], and the coupled channels approach combined with the three-particle Faddeev equations was used to describe
in [
206].
The analysis of
is within the CCQM [
207] done in a similar way to the
case: its decay modes are analyzed in both the molecular and tetraquark scenario. With quantitative measurements related to
not being very numerous, one can analyze the partial decay widths to
and open charm final states and see whether the latter ones are suppressed. The Feynman diagrams describing the studied transitions are drawn in
Figure 7. The considered open charm final states include
,
,
, and
. As follows from the previous section,
is described as a molecular state (
67).
The molecular-type non-local interpolating current for
is written as:
with:
The matrix element corresponding to the open charm production is given by:
where:
and the momenta are defined as:
The decay into
involves a three-loop diagram, and the corresponding matrix element is:
where:
and the momenta are defined as:
In the tetraquark scenario, the non-local
current takes the form:
The matrix element of the decay into
is expressed as:
with the momenta:
The matrix element of the decay into
is given by:
with the momenta:
Here, the summation over
is defined by:
The considered decays comprise different combinations of pseudoscalar, vector, and axial-vector particles in the final state. The relevant expressions for the matrix elements and decay widths are written down:
The value of
is set to
GeV, and guided by our experience, we assume that
GeV. The numerical evaluation leads to the results presented in
Table 4.
In both scenarios, the open charm decays are suppressed with respect to the decay channel. The discrimination between them is provided by the total decay width MeV, which is in contradiction with the molecular description. Thus, one can conclude that the CCQM approach favors the tetraquark structure of .
7. Bottomonium-Like States
and
Exotic quarkonia states appear also in the bottomonium sector: and are two examples. Even though the exotic bottomonia masses tend to be significantly higher than the charmonia ones, the underlying dynamics is similar, and one finds the molecular, tetraquark, and other hypotheses in theoretical approaches that describe them.
and
were seen as molecules in the boson exchange model of [
208], and the molecular picture was also favored in [
209], where the spin structure of these two particles was analyzed. Further support of the molecular scenario came from the quark model based on a phenomenological Lagrangian used by the authors of [
210] and also from other analyses preformed in [
211] (QCD multipole expansion), [
212] (effective field theory), [
213] (pion exchange model), [
214] (QCD sum rules, only
included), [
215] (heavy quark spin symmetry and coupled channels analysis),and [
216] (coupled channels approach with pion exchange model). A different set of works supports, with various intensity, the tetraquark structure of the two bottomonia states. In [
217], the conclusion followed from an effective diquark-antidiquark Hamiltonian combined with meson-loop induced effects. The authors of [
218] based their analysis on the QCD sum rules and interpreted
and
as axial-vector tetraquarks. The two works [
219,
220] also drew their conclusions from the QCD sum rules and allowed the tetraquark and molecular scenario. The former work suggested that
and
could have both the diquark-antidiquark and molecular components (following from a mixed interpolating current). The latter one excluded neither the tetraquark nor molecular the interpretation of
, and the idea of a mixed current appeared also. The mentioned analyses could be supplemented by numerous other works [
221,
222,
223,
224,
225,
226,
227,
228,
229,
230,
231,
232,
233,
234,
235,
236,
237,
238,
239,
240,
241] where further ideas and approaches were exploited.
The theoretical analysis of the
and
states by the CCQM was performed in [
81]. The work assumed a molecular-type interpolating current, which is favored by most theoretical approaches when interpreting the experimental results. It is a natural choice reflecting the proximity of the particle masses to the corresponding thresholds:
The quantum numbers of the two states
lead to the choice of (local) interpolating currents:
which guarantees that, when considering the transitions into
, the
state can decay only to the
pair, while the
state can decay only to a
pair. Decays into the
channels are not allowed.
Further decay channels include a bottomonium particle accompanied with a charged light meson. Taking into account the
G parity, which is conserved in strong interactions and kinematic considerations, only three possible bottomonium-meson decay channels are available:
,
and
. All mentioned
transition can be arranged into three groups with respect to the spin kinematics:
The classification of the bottomonia particles based on their quantum numbers is shown in
Table 5.
The expressions for matrix elements and decay widths depend on the spin structure and are for the three cases as follows.
For
transitions, the matrix element can be parameterized with two Lorentz structures:
The invariant amplitudes
A and
B can be combined into the helicity amplitudes:
which are practical to express the decay width. For the derivation of the latter, it is useful to work in the rest frame of the initial particle, where
is the three-momentum and
is the energy of the final state vector. Furthermore, the on-mass-shell character of the initial and final state particles is taken into account by
,
,
, and
. One arrives at:
The matrix element for the
transitions is expressed through one covariant term only:
The decay with the formula can be written as:
where one can note the
p-wave suppression factor
.
As shown in [
81], the matrix element for
decay can be parameterized using three amplitudes:
The relation between the helicity amplitudes
(
) and the invariant amplitudes can be shown to be:
The rate of the decay
, finally, reads:
Coming back to the CCQM description, one can write the non-local versions of Equations (83) and (84) as follows:
The interaction Lagrangian is constructed in the usual way for
; in the case of
, the stress tensor of the field is introduced
:
The factor
is put into the denominator in order to preserve the same physical dimensions of the
and
couplings. The link between these couplings and the size parameters is done via the compositeness condition, which is based on the evaluation of hadronic mass operators. The latter are written in the momentum space as:
where
and:
A list of matrix elements for different decay reactions as predicted by the CCQM is given in what follows. For each element, we provide, in the last line of the corresponding expression, the form factor parametrization of the matrix element to be compared with the appropriate expression from Equations (
85), (
87), and (
89). Beforehand, let us also define the argument of
. One has:
where
denotes four body reduced masses
and quarks are indexed as
,
.
matrix elements parametrized as in Equation (85):
matrix elements parametrized as in Equation (
87):
The matrix elements describing decays to a pair of
B mesons can be also listed within two groups depending on the quantum numbers. The argument of the
-vertex function
is defined as:
The quark indices are similar to the previous case
,
,
,
,
, and
.
matrix elements parametrized as in Equation (
85):
matrix elements parametrized as in Equation (
89):
With all the above theoretical expressions, one can proceed to the numerical evaluation of the decay widths. The first step is the adjustment of the size parameters
and
. They are tuned so as to respect the observables measured by the Belle collaboration [
35]:
leading to:
With the decays into
B pairs dominating all other decay channels, we approximate the total decay width as the sum of all herein evaluated channels. The CCQM gives:
which is in fair agreement with (108). The predicted partial decay widths of
and
particles are summarized in
Table 6.
The
and
decays are dominated [
13] by
and
, respectively, meaning that the bottomonia modes should not exceed 15 and 25 percent. This is observed for the
final state; the other bottomonia channels are suppressed, but not so much as seen in the data:
The model also allows us to make predictions:
One can conclude that the CCQM provides, within a molecular picture, a fair description of / states and related decay observables and catches the tendencies seen in experimental data. Some deviations are observed when the fraction of bottomonium in final states is considered.