Efimov effect in pionless effective field theory and its application to hadronic molecules

In the past years various new hadronic states were discovered in the charm and bottom meson sector by experiments like Belle, BES and Babar. Many of these states fit into the conventional charmonium or bottomonium spectrum, but a growing number of them does not. Especially, the charged ones which can definitely be no conventional hadrons motivate the term exotic hadrons to classify particles which are neither conventional baryons nor conventional mesons. Their substructure is not yet clear due to the often poor experimental knowledge and there are many different interpretations for these exotic particles. One very popular idea is the hadronic molecule interpretation which states that two ordinary hadrons can form a loosely bound pair similar to the deuteron made of a proton and a neutron. However, in the latter system it is known that after adding a third nucleon there appears a three particle bound state, the triton. The emergence of such a three-body state can be explained by the Efimov effect as a low-energy universality phenomenon. The question which will be answered in this work is if there exists also an Efimov effect in systems of hadronic molecules which scatter off a third meson or baryon. Since the number of candidate systems is large (and still growing due to ongoing experiments) it is useful to find a general expression that tells us if the Efimov effect is present. Moreover, this expression should only depend on the basic particle properties like mass, spin and isospin. Such a relation will be derived in this work for a generic three particle system that can be described in a pionless effective field theory. It will then be applied to a set of possible hadronic molecule systems in order to check if the Efimov effect occurs. The thesis is organized as follows: after an introduction of quantum chromodynamics and a review of the classification of hadrons we continue with a summary, firstly, of experimental observations concerning exotic hadrons, secondly, of the idea of effective field theories and thirdly, of basic scattering theory. In chapter 2 the three identical boson system will be discussed in order to explain the Efimov effect more quantitatively. With this knowledge it is possible to derive the mentioned general expression regarding the existence of Efimov physics in a generic three particle system. After the detailed derivation in chapter 3 (using the information given in the appendices) the results will be applied to scattering processes where known hadronic molecules as well as hypothetical ones are involved. This is done in order to either search for the Efimov effect or - for the hypothetical molecular states - to predict under which conditions an Efimov trimer is expected. For system without Efimov effect we will calculate in chapter 5 for a selected example S-wave observables of the in this case elastic scattering process. The thesis is completed by a summary of the results and an outlook on further work that can be done based on this work.