Stable pentaquarks from strange chiral multiplets

The assumption of strong diquark correlations in the QCD spectrum suggests flavor multiplets of hadrons that are degenerate in the chiral limit. Generally it would be unnatural for there to be degeneracy in the hadron spectrum that is not protected by a QCD symmetry. Here we show—for pentaquarks constructed from diquarks—that these degeneracies can be naturally protected by the full chiral symmetry of QCD. The resulting chiral multiplet structure recovers the ideally mixed pentaquark mass spectrum of the diquark model, and interestingly, requires that the axial couplings of the pentaquarks to states outside the degenerate multiplets vanish in the chiral limit. This result suggests that if these hadrons exist, they are stable in the chiral limit and therefore have widths that scale as the fourth power of the kaon mass over the chiral-symmetry breaking scale. Natural-size widths are of order a few MeV.