Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass

Baryon Scattering Collaboration

doi:10.1103/D2HG-H6D4

Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass

Baryon Scattering Collaboration

Advanced Computing for Nuclear, Particle

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, m_π = m_K ≃ 714 MeV. Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function.

Original language	English
Article number	024002
Journal	Physical Review C
Volume	113
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1103/D2HG-H6D4
State	Published - Jan 2026

Funding

We thank Sinya Aoki and Jeremy Green for comments on the paper and results. The results presented here utilized the Summit Supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725; the Lassen Supercompuer through the LLNL Multiprogrammatic and Institutional Computing program for Grand Challenge allocations; the Frontera Supercomputer [92] at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC); the Perlmutter Supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility using NERSC awards NP-ERCAP0021598, NP-ERCAP0017492, and NP-ERCAP0015497. The CHROMA_LAPH and LAST_LAPH libraries were used to perform the sLapH calculations, making use of QDP++ [93] and CHROMA [94] software libraries. The quark propagator solves were performed with the QUDA library [95–97], and the final contractions used CON-TRACTION_OPTIMIZER [98]. The LALIBE library [99], branch feature/mp_nn was used to perform computations of the HAL QCD potential. The correlation function analysis code makes use of LSQFIT [100], GVAR [101] and TWOHADRONSIN-BOX [71]. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under awards PHY-1913158 and PHY-2209167 (C.M., S.S.), under award PHY-2209185 (A.S.), the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) under award PHY-2047185 (A.N.), and by the Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-2040435 (J.M.). This work was also supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under grant contract numbers DE-AC02-05CH11231 (A.W.-L., J.M.), DE-SC0020250 (A.S.M.), DE-SC0004658 (K.M.), the DOE Topical Collaboration “Nuclear Theory for New Physics,” award No. DE-SC0023663 (A.N., A.S., A.W.-L, C.M., J.M.), and U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. The SCGSR program is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) for the DOE. ORISE is managed by ORAU under contract number DESC0014664 (J.M.). This work is supported by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC DE-AC52-07NA27344 (P.M.V., A.S.M.), Neutrino Theory Network Program Grant DE-AC02-07CHI11359 (A.S.M.). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR2272 (H.M.-C.). This work was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through grant 513989149 (A.S.). This work was supported in part by ERC grant StrangeScatt-101088506 (J.B.).

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title = "Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass",

abstract = "We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, mπ = mK ≃ 714 MeV. Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function.",

author = "\{Baryon Scattering Collaboration\} and John Bulava and Clark, \{M. A.\} and Gambhir, \{Arjun S.\} and Hanlon, \{Andrew D.\} and Ben H{\"o}rz and B{\'a}lint Jo{\'o} and Christopher K{\"o}rber and Ken McElvain and Meyer, \{Aaron S.\} and Henry Monge-Camacho and Colin Morningstar and Joseph Moscoso and Amy Nicholson and Fernando Romero-L{\'o}pez and Ermal Rrapaj and Andrea Shindler and Sarah Skinner and Vranas, \{Pavlos M.\} and Andr{\'e} Walker-Loud",

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doi = "10.1103/D2HG-H6D4",

language = "English",

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AU - Baryon Scattering Collaboration

AU - Bulava, John

AU - Clark, M. A.

AU - Gambhir, Arjun S.

AU - Hanlon, Andrew D.

AU - Hörz, Ben

AU - Joó, Bálint

AU - Körber, Christopher

AU - McElvain, Ken

AU - Meyer, Aaron S.

AU - Monge-Camacho, Henry

AU - Morningstar, Colin

AU - Moscoso, Joseph

AU - Nicholson, Amy

AU - Romero-López, Fernando

AU - Rrapaj, Ermal

AU - Shindler, Andrea

AU - Skinner, Sarah

AU - Vranas, Pavlos M.

AU - Walker-Loud, André

PY - 2026/1

Y1 - 2026/1

N2 - We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, mπ = mK ≃ 714 MeV. Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function.

AB - We perform a high-statistics lattice QCD calculation of the low-energy two-nucleon scattering amplitudes. To address discrepancies in the literature, the calculation is performed at a heavy pion mass in the limit that the light quark masses are equal to the physical strange quark mass, mπ = mK ≃ 714 MeV. Using a state-of-the-art momentum space method, we rule out the presence of a bound di-nucleon in both the isospin 0 (deuteron) and 1 (di-neutron) channels, in contrast with many previous results that made use of compact hexaquark creation operators. To diagnose the discrepancy, we add such hexaquark interpolating operators to our basis and find that they do not affect the determination of the two-nucleon finite-volume spectrum, and thus they do not couple to deeply bound di-nucleons that are missed by the momentum-space operators. Furthermore, we perform a high-statistics calculation of the HAL QCD potential on the same gauge ensembles and find qualitative agreement with our main results. We conclude that di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion masses and that previous identification of deeply bound di-nucleons must have arisen from a misidentification of the spectrum from off-diagonal elements of a correlation function.

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DO - 10.1103/D2HG-H6D4

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VL - 113

JO - Physical Review C

JF - Physical Review C

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M1 - 024002

ER -

Di-nucleons do not form bound states at heavy pion mass

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