Role of Large Gluonic Excitation Energy for Narrow Width of Penta-Quark Baryons in QCD String Theory Original Research Article

We study the narrow decay width of low-lying penta-quark baryons in the QCD string theory in terms of gluonic excitations. In the QCD string theory, penta-quark baryons decay via a gluonic-excited state of a baryon and meson system, where a pair of Y-shaped junction and anti-junction is created. Since lattice QCD shows that the lowest gluonic-excitation energy takes a large value of about 1 GeV, the decay of penta-quark baryons near the threshold is considered as a quantum tunneling process via a highly-excited state (a gluonic-excited state) in the QCD string theory. This mechanism strongly suppresses the low-lying penta-quark decay and leads to an extremely narrow decay width.