Tetraquarks, hadronic molecules, meson-meson scattering and disconnected contributions in lattice QCD

There are generally two types of Wick contractions in lattice QCD calculations of a correlation function --- connected and disconnected ones. The disconnected contribution is difficult to calculate and noisy, thus it is often neglected. In the context of studying tetraquarks, hadronic molecules and meson-meson scattering, we show that whenever there are both connected and singly disconnected contractions, the singly disconnected part gives the leading order contribution, and thus should never be neglected. As an explicit example, we show that information about the scalar mesons sigma, f0(980), a0(980) and kappa will be lost when neglecting the disconnected contributions.