To bind or not to bind: The H-dibaryon in light of chiral effective field theory

We analyze the quark mass dependence of the binding energy of the H-dibaryon in the framework of chiral effective field theory. We show that the SU(3) breaking effects induced by the differences of the pertinent two-baryon thresholds (ΛΛ, ΞN, ΣΣ) have a very pronounced impact that need to be incorporated properly in future lattice QCD simulations. We also point out that if the H-dibaryon is a two-baryon bound state, its dominant component is ΞN rather than ΛΛ, which is a consequence of the approximate SU(3) flavor symmetry of the two-baryon interactions.