Insights from exotic hadrons through lattice QCD

Abstract

Nuclear physics is built on a solid understanding of individual nucleons, which can ultimately be described in terms of light quarks and gluons. The surprising recent discoveries of several tetraquark and pentaquark candidates, each containing both light and heavy quarks, offer new insight into the physics of quarks and gluons. Lattice QCD is a rigorous first-principles computational approach that can calculate some properties of these new exotic hadrons. The status of lattice QCD studies will be reviewed for a particular family of doubly heavy exotic hadrons, including possible implications for our understanding of light quark physics.