Status of Pentaquark Search at Jlab

The proposed high-luminosity Super Tau-Charm Facility (STCF) offers a clean experimental environment for threshold studies of exotic hadrons. In this Letter, we evaluate the expected significance for the fully-charmed vector tetraquark candidate $T_{4c}$ in the $e^+e^- \to η_c J/ψ$ channel at the STCF. Using Monte Carlo simulations of an energy scan from $\sqrt{s}=6.71$ to $6.79~\mathrm{GeV}$ with $100~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ per point, we adopt a high-efficiency single-tag (ST) reconstruction of $J/ψ$ leptonic decays as the primary strategy, with a double-tag (DT) reconstruction of $η_c \to K^+K^-π^0$ retained as an independent cross-check. Because the signal cross section is governed by the still-uncertain dielectron width $Γ_{ee}$, we consider three benchmark hypotheses, $Γ_{ee}=0.25, 0.5, 1~\mathrm{eV}$. The corresponding expected ST significances are $5.1\,σ$, $10.6\,σ$, and $20.5\,σ$, respectively. These results indicate that the STCF can provide meaningful sensitivity to fully-charmed tetraquark states near threshold.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

From Hits to Tracks: A BERT-based Tracking Model for Track Reconstruction in Drift Chambers

Track reconstruction in drift chambers is essential for momentum measurement and particle identification at electron-positron colliders. While Transformer architectures have transformed many sequence-processing domains, their application to tracking in high energy physics is still being explored. We present a model that combines a BERT encoder with a Transformer decoder to perform hit-to-track association through autoregressive sorting. The model is evaluated on the DCTracks open dataset that provides realistic drift chamber simulations with varying particle types, momenta, track multiplicities, and noise conditions. Across single-track, two-track, and multi-track samples, the model achieves high hit and track efficiencies while keeping the rates of clones and fakes very low. It also works well in the reconstruction of displaced vertices. These results show BERT-based sequence-to-sequence models as a promising approach for track reconstruction in low-background, precision-oriented experiments.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Separating coherent and incoherent photoproduction at an Electron-Ion Collider: Comparing lead, gold and silver beams

Exclusive photoproduction is an important probe of nuclear parton distributions at low Bjorken-$x$. The Good-Walker paradigm relates coherent photoproduction to the average nuclear configuration, giving access to the transverse distribution of gluons in a target, while incoherent photoproduction is sensitive to fluctuations such as gluonic hotspots. Efficiently separating coherent and incoherent interactions is a key challenge for experiments at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). In this article, we study nuclear de-excitation via photon emission, and see how the finite photon detection efficiency leads to misidentification of incoherent emission. We compare the detection efficiency for incoherent $J/ψ$ production using the BeAGLE event generator for Ag-107, Au-197, and Pb-208 targets, for two different forward photon energy thresholds: 50 MeV and 200 MeV. The shell structures of the three species exhibit different incoherent tagging efficiencies due to differences in the lifetimes and energy levels of their excited states. Some of the low-lying states live long enough so that they decay outside the EIC detectors. Especially for the lower photon energy threshold, lead allows a higher tagging efficiency than gold, due to its lack of low-lying and/or long-lived excited states.

hep-ex↗