Exotic states in the quarkonium sector — status and perspectives

Abstract

The discovery of hadronic states beyond the conventional two-quark meson and three-quark baryon picture in the last two decades is one of the most amazing accomplishments in fundamental physics research. Many experiments contributed to this field despite of the original goals of the design. We review the experimental progress on the study of the quarkoniumlike states — states with at least one heavy quark-antiquark pair and possible light quarks, also known as XYZ states. We give a general review and then focus on the new experimental results on the X(3872) and its bottom-quark partner Xb, the X(3960), the Y(4260), Y(4500), Y(4660), and Y(10750), and the charged charmoniumlike Zc and Zcs states. The observations suggest that we did observe hadronic molecules and we also observed hadronic states with some other quark configurations. Possible further studies at the existing and future facilities are briefly discussed.