Three-body universality in the B meson sector

Abstract

The charged exotic mesons Zb(10610) and Zb (10650) observed by the Belle collaboration in 2011 are very close to the B B¯ and B B¯ thresholds, respectively. This suggests their interpretation as shallow hadronic molecules of B and B∗ mesons. Using the masses of the Zb(10610) and Zb (10650) as input, we rule out the possibility for universal bound states of three B and B∗ mesons arising from the Efimov effect based on their spin-isospin structure. As a consequence, we can predict the phase shifts for the scattering of B and B∗ mesons off the exotic mesons Zb(10610) and Zb (10650) to leading order in a non-relativistic effective field theory with contact interactions based on two-body information alone.