Demonstrates mass splittings of pentaquarks in light-quark cloud, suggesting new particle behavior.
We extend the baryo-charmonium picture of pentaquarks – a color-octet cc̄ c c ¯ core bonded to a color-octet light-quark cloud – to the doubly-strange sector cc̄ ssq c c ¯ s s q . The mass splittings are set entirely by the light cloud, so the only new inputs are the strange–strange couplings Jˢˢ J ss , fixed by a second application of the chromomagnetic scaling, and an additive strange-mass increment taken from the observed Pc\!→ \!Pcs P c → P cs shift. We obtain two negative-parity triplets, one produced with a kaon and one with an antiproton, the lowest kaon-associated 1/2⁻ 1 2 - state near 4.60 GeV and the antiproton-associated triplet some 120 MeV below. The robust, distinctive prediction is that the upper two kaon-associated states form a near-degenerate doublet, in sharp contrast to the well-separated triplets of the lighter sectors – a sparse, fixed-spacing pattern that sets the scheme apart from the molecular and diquark alternatives. The internal splittings follow without adjustment from the measured Pc P c and Pcs P cs spectra; the absolute scale relies on the additive strange-mass ansatz, the main assumption of the extrapolation. The predicted masses agree with recent molecular coupled-channel and QCD sum-rule results.
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Halil Mutuk (2026) studied this question.
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