Title: Meson molecules in strong magnetic fields
Date: Sep 8, 2026
Time: 13:30 - 14:30
Speaker: Prof. Toru Kojo
Affiliation: KEK
Abstract: QCD in strong magnetic fields provides a useful testbed for studying nonperturbative dynamics. Full-QCD lattice simulations have shown that the energies of charged pions and kaons evolve nonmonotonically with increasing magnetic field, in contrast to the behavior found in quenched simulations. This qualitative difference suggests that additional hadronic degrees of freedom, absent in the quenched approximation, may play an important role. In this talk, I will discuss how strong magnetic fields lead to dimensional reduction in the dynamics of neutral and charged mesons. I will then use this reduced dynamics to construct a Born-Oppenheimer description of meson-molecule states. The resulting picture provides a possible interpretation of the nonmonotonic charged-pion and kaon energies observed in lattice QCD.