Light scalar tetraquarks from a holographic perspective

We discuss how a dominant tetraquark component of the lightest scalar mesons may emerge in AdS/QCD gravity duals. In particular, we show that the exceptionally strong binding required to render the tetraquark ground state lighter than the lowest-lying scalar quark-antiquark nonet can be holographically encoded into bulk-mass corrections for the tetraquark's dual mode. The latter are argued to originate from the anomalous dimension of the corresponding four-quark interpolator. To provide a concrete example, we implement this mechanism into the dilaton soft-wall dual for holographic QCD. Preventing the lowest-lying dual mode from collapsing into the AdS boundary then establishes a rather generic lower bound on the tetraquark mass (which may be overcome in the presence of additional background fields). We further demonstrate that the higher tetraquark excitations can become heavier than their quark-antiquark counterparts and are thus likely to dissolve into the multiparticle continuum.