Abstract: In this dissertation, we investigate exotic hadrons with heavy-quark content that may be understood as being generated dynamically from the hadron–hadron interaction. This interaction is derived from a suitable effective Lagrangian and properly unitarized in a full coupled-channel basis. In particular, we discuss the possible interpretation of some of the Ωc* excited states recently discovered at LHCb as being meson–baryon molecular states. We also discuss the dynamical generation of excited open-charm mesons from the scattering of pseudoscalar and vector charmed mesons off light mesons. We show that a double-pole structure is predicted for the D0*(2300) state, as well as for the D1(2430), while the Ds0*(2317) and the Ds1(2460) may be interpreted as molecular bound states. Extensions of these calculations to the bottom sector are also presented.
Furthermore, we investigate the thermal modification of the open heavy-flavor mesons in a hot medium. By means of an extension to finite temperature of the unitarized effective interactions with the light mesons, we obtain the in-medium spectral properties of the D, D*, Ds, and Ds* ground-state mesons. We also analyze the temperature dependence of the masses and the decay widths of the dynamically generated states. Additionally, we provide results for the bottomed mesons by exploiting the heavy-quark spin-flavor symmetry of the Lagrangian.
In order to test the results of the thermal effective theory against lattice QCD calculations, we employ the temperature-dependent spectral functions to compute charm Euclidean correlators. We find that the meson Euclidean correlators computed with the two approaches compare reasonably well at temperatures below the QCD phase transition temperature. We also present calculations of off-shell transport coefficients in the hadronic phase implementing in-medium scattering amplitudes and the thermal dependence of the heavy-meson spectral properties. In the quark-gluon-plasma phase, the transport coefficients have been recently computed with lattice QCD and extracted from Bayesian analyses of heavy-ion collision data. We observe a smooth matching with our results at the QCD phase transition temperature.

Evaluating Committee

President: Dra. Claudia Ratti
Secretary: Dr. Volodymyr Magas
Vocal: Dr. Ángel Gómez Nicola

Suplents:
Dr. Elena Bratkovskaya
Dr. Arnau Ríos Huguet

Directors:
Dra. ANGELS RAMOS GOMEZ
Dra. LAURA TOLÓS RIGUEIRO

Tutor: Dr. JOAN SOTO RIERA