Pentaquarks in the Chiral Symmetry Limit

Abstract

We demonstrate that a five quark state of positive parity with an internal P-wave structure - usually pictured as a composite of an antiquark and two diquarks in a P-wave state - can couple to nucleons and Goldstone particles in a chirally invariant way. The corresponding decay width is generally not suppressed. A pentaquark of positive or negative parity with an internal S-wave structure, which may be viewed as a composite of an antiquark and two chirally different diquarks in an S-state, does not couple to nucleons and light mesons in the limit of an unbroken chiral symmetry. It is stable in this limit. However, such states can decay via the effect of the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. This breaking is strong because of the sizeable magnitude of the quark condensate. Thus, chiral symmetry cannot be the cause of a tiny decay amplitude, even for pentaquarks stable in a strict chiral symmetry limit.

Modified version. We added a discussion of the effect of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry on the pentaquark. This has changed part of our conclusions: we argue that the effect is large indicating that chiral symmetry cannot be the origin of the small width of the pentaquark