Speaker
Description
Variational methods can be used to provide robust upper bounds on the energy spectra of hadrons and nuclei, but the presence of small energy gaps for multi-hadron states makes it difficult to ensure that the ground- and lowest-energy excited-states have been identified. I will discuss recent calculations of two-baryon systems using large and varied sets of interpolating operators, including non-local products of plane-wave baryons as well as operators spanning the full Hilbert space of local six-quark operators, to probe for the existence of two-baryon bound states at unphysically large quark masses. Results for baryon-baryon scattering phase shifts and their implications for understanding the quark mass dependence of baryon-baryon interactions will also be discussed.
