Chiral Doubling of Heavy-Light Hadrons: BaBar 2317 MeV and CLEO 2463 MeV Discoveries

Abstract

We point out that the very recent discoveries of BaBar (2317) and CLEO II (2460) are consistent with the general pattern of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in hadrons built of heavy and light quarks, as originally suggested by us in 1992, and independently by Bardeen and Hill in 1993. The splitting between the chiral doublers follows from a mixing between the light constituent quark mass and the velocity of the heavy quark, and vanishes for a zero constituent quark mass. The general strictures of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking constrain the axial charges in the chiral multiplet, and yield a mass splitting between the chiral doublers of about 345 MeV when the pion coupling to the doublers is half its coupling to a free quark. The chiral corrections are small. This phenomenon is generic and extends to all heavy-light hadrons. We predict the mass splitting for the chiral doublers of the excited mesons (D1,D2). We suggest that the heavy-light doubling can be used to address issues of chiral symmetry restoration in dense and/or hot hadronic matter. In particular, the relative splitting between D and D* mesons and their chiral partners decreases in matter, with consequences on charmonium evolution at RHIC.