Mirage in temporal correlation functions for baryon-baryon interactions in lattice QCD

Single state saturation of the temporal correlation function is a key condition to extract physical observables such as energies and matrix elements of hadrons from lattice QCD simulations. A method commonly employed to check the saturation is to seek for a plateau of the observables for large Euclidean time. Identifying the plateau in the cases having nearby states, however, is non-trivial and one may even be misled by a fake plateau. Such a situation takes place typically for a system with two or more baryons. In this study, we demonstrate explicitly the danger from a possible fake plateau in the temporal correlation functions mainly for two baryons (ΞΞ and N N), and three and four baryons (³He and ⁴He) as well, employing (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD at m_π = 0.51GeV on four lattice volumes with L = 2.9, 3.6, 4.3 and 5.8 fm. Caution is required when drawing conclusions about the bound N N , 3N and 4N systems based only on the standard plateau fitting of the temporal correlation functions.[Figure not available: see fulltext.]