Observation of an exotic narrow doubly charmed tetraquark

Abstract

Conventional hadronic matter consists of baryons and mesons made of three quarks and quark-antiquark pairs, respectively. The observation of a new type of hadronic state, a doubly charmed tetraquark containing two charm quarks, an anti-$u$ and an anti-$d$ quark, is reported using data collected by the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. This exotic state with a mass of about 3875 MeV$/c^2$ manifests itself as a narrow peak in the mass spectrum of $D^0{D}^0\ddot{I}{€}^{+}$ mesons just below the $D^{\ast +}{D}^0$ mass threshold. The near threshold mass together with a strikingly narrow width reveals the resonance nature of the state.

9 pages, 1 figure; All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2021-031.html (LHCb public pages)