Francesco Giovanni Celiberto: "Heavy-Flavor Fragmentation: The QCD Portal to Exotic Matter"

Thursday 12 Jun 2025, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

Sala Direzione INFN

Heavy-flavored hadrons stand at the forefront of the search for New Physics. As natural gateways to potential Beyond the Standard Model interactions, they probe unknown interactions through expected couplings to hypothetical particles. Their sensitivity to rare processes and symmetry violations makes them ideal targets for high-precision studies. At the same time, heavy flavors offer a unique window into strong-interaction dynamics, connecting perturbative and nonperturbative QCD. For this reason, they are often called the “hydrogen atoms” of QCD, where precision tools and hadronic structure converge.

In the first part of the seminar, we introduce the fragmentation of heavy-flavored hadrons, focusing on quarkonium states as a reference. We present the Heavy-Flavor Non-Relativistic evolution (HF-NRevo) scheme, a novel approach for describing the nonperturbative formation of these hadrons in high-energy processes. By linking perturbative short-distance inputs with hadron-structure-inspired components, HF-NRevo enables the consistent construction of fragmentation functions for ordinary heavy mesons.

In the second part, we extend HF-NRevo to exotic matter, exploring quark and gluon fragmentation into multi-heavy tetraquarks and pentaquarks. This includes both compact and diquark-based configurations, leading to model-driven functions for an emerging class of fully heavy hadrons. Ultimately, we aim to exploit the best of the two worlds, precision QCD and hadronic-matter exploration, in a unified search for novel physics hidden at the heart of the strong interaction.