Exotic Tetraquarks at the HL-LHC with JETHAD: A High-Energy Viewpoint

Abstract

We review the semi-inclusive hadroproduction of a neutral hidden-flavor tetraquark with light and heavy quark flavor at the HL-LHC, accompanied by another heavy hadron or a light-flavored jet. We make use of the novel TQHL1.0 determinations of leading-twist fragmentation functions to describe the formation mechanism of a tetraquark state within the next-to-leading order perturbative QCD. This framework builds on the basis of a spin physics-inspired model, taken as a proxy for the lowest-scale input of the constituent heavy-quark fragmentation channel. Then, all parton-to-tetraquark fragmentation functions are consistently obtained via the above-threshold DGLAP evolution in a variable-flavor number scheme. We provide predictions for a series of differential distributions calculated by the hands of the JETHAD method, well-adapted to NLL/NLO+ hybrid-factorization studies, where the resummation of next-to-leading energy logarithms and beyond is included in the collinear picture. We provide corroborating evidence that high-energy observables sensitive to semi-inclusive tetraquark emissions at the HL-LHC exhibit a fair stability under radiative corrections, as well as MHOU studies. Our analysis constitutes a prime contact point between QCD resummations and the exotic matter.