Relativistic light-front bound-state equations for double-heavy mesons, baryons and tetraquarks are constructed in the framework of supersymmetric light front holographic QCD. Although heavy quark masses strongly break conformal symmetry, supersymmetry and the holographic embedding of semiclassical light-front dynamics still holds. The theory, derived from five-dimensional anti–de Sitter space, predicts that the form of the confining potential in the light-front Hamiltonian is harmonic even for heavy quarks. Therefore, the basic underlying supersymmetric mechanism, which transforms meson-baryon and baryon-tetraquark wave functions into each other, can also be applied to the double-heavy sector; one can then successfully relate the masses of the double-heavy mesons to double-heavy baryons and tetraquarks. The dependence of the confining potential on the hadron mass scale agrees completely with the one derived in heavy light systems from heavy quark symmetry. We also make predictions for higher excitations of the charmonium and bottomonium states. In particular, the remarkable equality of the Regge slopes in the orbital angular momentum, $L$, and the principal quantum number, $n$, is predicted to remain valid.

• Received 31 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.034002

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Published by the American Physical Society