Abstract. There is great recent interest in the study of bound states of charmed hadrons with atomic nuclei. The studies rely on effective interactions expressed through couplings between charmed and light-flavored hadrons whose values are fixed using SU(4) flavor symmetry. In the present communication we present results of recent studies examining the accuracy of SU(4)-flavor symmetry relations between hadron-hadron couplings with particular interest in the couplings of charmed D mesons to light mesons and nucleons. We discuss results obtained from a 3 P 0 quark-pair creation model and from a framework based on Dyson-Schwinger equations in QCD that incorporates a consistent, direct and simultaneous description of light-and heavy-quarks. We focus on the three-meson couplings , KK, and DD and meson-baryon-brayon couplings NN, K s N , and D c N . While the 3 P 0 model predicts that the SU(4) breaking is at most 40% in the charm sector, the relativistic Dyson-Schwinger framework predicts a breaking 10 times bigger. Consequences of these findings for the predictions of DN cross sections, formation of bound states of D-mesons and J / , and the formation of charmed hypernuclei are discussed.
Charm in matter and the DN interactionThe study of the interaction of heavy-flavored hadrons with matter is of interest in different contexts. One instance of interest is related to the exciting perspective of creating new exotic nuclear bound states. Examples are J / and c forming bound states with a nucleus [1][2][3][4][5], charmed hypernuclei [6], and charmed heavy-light D and D * mesons [7-9] -for a recent review, see Ref. [10]. A pre-requisite for reliable predictions of properties of charmed hadrons in matter is the understanding of their interactions with nucleons and other light mesons in free space. A particularly critical issue in the study of such exotic nuclear states is the DN interaction. There is no direct experimental information available for this interaction and, for the time being, one has to rely on models constrained by symmetry, analogies with other similar processes, and the use of different degrees of freedom [11][12][13][14][15][16][17].Effective Lagrangians based on SU(4)-flavor symmetry are widely used in the study of the interactions of charmed hadrons with matter. In the particular case of the exotic J / nuclear bound state [2][3][4][5], the J / meson interacts with the bound nucleons via virtual D and D * loops -see Fig. 1. a