The light scalar mesons as tetraquarks

We present a numerical solution of the four-quark Bethe-Salpeter equation for ground-state scalar tetraquarks with J(PC) = 0(++). We find that the four-body equation dynamically generates pseudoscalar-meson poles in the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude. The resulting tetraquarks are genuine four-quark states that are dominated by pseudoscalar meson-meson correlations. Diquark-antidiquark contributions are subleading because of their larger mass scale. In the light quark sector, the sensitivity of the tetraquark wave function to the pion poles leads to an isoscalar tetraquark mass M-sigma similar to 350 MeV which is comparable to that of the sigma/f(0) (500). The masses of its multiplet partners kappa and a(0)/f(0) follow a similar pattern. This provides support for a tetraquark interpretation of the light scalar meson nonet in terms of 'meson molecules'. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).