Charmed Mesons and Charmonia: Three-Meson Strong Couplings
Revisiting the strong couplings of three mesons, each of which involves at least one charm quark, proves clear disaccord between quark-model and QCD sum-rule results.
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Publications and source records attributed to Wolfgang Lucha.
Revisiting the strong couplings of three mesons, each of which involves at least one charm quark, proves clear disaccord between quark-model and QCD sum-rule results.
Inversion enables the construction of interaction potentials underlying - under fortunate circumstances even analytic - instantaneous Bethe-Salpeter descriptions of all lightest pseudoscalar mesons as quark-antiquark bound states of Goldstone-boson nature.
Starting from a phenomenologically successful, numerical solution of the Dyson-Schwinger equation that governs the quark propagator, we reconstruct in detail the interaction kernel that has to enter the instantaneous approximation to the Bethe-Salpeter equation to allow us to describe the lightest pseudoscalar mesons as quark-antiquark bound states exhibiting the (almost) masslessness necessary for them to be interpretable as the (pseudo) Goldstone bosons related to the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking of quantum chromodynamics.
Within the Bethe-Salpeter formalism for instantaneous interactions, we describe, along a totally analytic route, the lightest pseudoscalar mesons by quark-antiquark bound states which show at least three indispensable general features, namely, the (almost) masslessness required for pions and kaons to be interpretable as (pseudo) Goldstone bosons, the suitable asymptotic behaviour in the limit of large spacelike relative momenta as determined by the relationship between quark mass function and Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes, and a pointwise behaviour for finite spacelike relative momenta suited for guaranteeing colour confinement.
We discuss the strong couplings $g_{PPV}$ and $g_{VVP}$ for vector ($V$) and pseudoscalar ($P$) mesons, at least one of which is a charmonium state $J/ψ$ or $η_c$. The strong couplings are obtained as residues at the poles of suitable form factors, calculated in a broad range of momentum transfers using a dispersion formulation of the relativistic constituent quark model. The form factors obtained in this approach satisfy all constraints known for these quantities in the heavy-quark limit. Our results suggest sizably higher values for the strong meson couplings than those reported in the literature from QCD sum rules.
The domain of validity of the higher-order Schrodinger equations is analyzed for harmonic-oscillator and Coulomb potentials as typical examples. Then the Cauchy theory for higher-order Hartree-Fock equations with bounded and Coulomb potentials is developed. Finally, the existence of associated ground states for the odd-order equations is proved. This renders these quantum equations relevant for physics.
The light pseudoscalar mesons play a twofold role: they may or have to be regarded both as low-lying bound states of the fundamental degrees of freedom of quantum chromodynamics as well as the (pseudo-) Goldstone bosons of the spontaneously broken chiral symmetries of quantum chromodynamics. We interrelate these aspects in a single quantum-field-theoretic approach relying on the Bethe-Salpeter formalism in instantaneous approximation by very simple means: the shape of the pseudoscalar-meson Bethe-Salpeter wave function dictated by chiral symmetry is used in Bethe-Salpeter equations for bound states of vanishing mass, in order to deduce analytically the interactions which govern the bound states under study. In this way, we obtain exact Bethe-Salpeter solutions for pseudoscalar mesons, in the sense of establishing the rigorous relationship between, on the one hand, the relevant interactions and, on the other hand, the Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes that characterize the bound states.
We extract the strong coupling constants of three mesons, each of which is composed of either two charm quarks or one charm quark and one light (i.e., $u$, $d$, or $s$) quark, from the matrix elements for the transitions of two of these mesons induced by appropriate quark currents within the framework of a relativistic dispersion approach to the constituent-quark picture of mesons. Among others, we also analyse the impact of the violation of the SU(3) flavour symmetry by the quark masses. In the case of mesons containing one light quark, we observe, in two respects, discrepancies between our findings and the predictions of QCD sum rules: our strong couplings exceed considerably the ones emerging from QCD sum rules, and, in our approach, the replacement of a light quark by a strange quark entails, in contrast to QCD sum rules, a reduction of the magnitudes of the strong couplings.
The relative magnitude of the decay constants of the pseudoscalar and vector beauty mesons poses (in contrast to the case of charmed mesons) a long-standing puzzle. We revisit this problem within the framework of our recent improvements of the QCD sum-rule formalism for relating observable properties of mesons to quantum chromodynamics and are led to conclude that the decay constants of the beauty vector mesons are undoubtedly smaller than those of their pseudoscalar counterparts.
We present our analysis of the decay constants of the beauty vector mesons $B^*$ and $B^*_s$ within the framework of dispersive sum rules for the two-point correlator of vector currents in QCD. While the decay constants of the vector mesons $f_{B^*}$ and $f_{B_s^*}$ $-$ similar to the decay constants of the pseudoscalar mesons $f_B$ and $f_{B_s}$ $-$ individually have large uncertainties induced by theory parameters not known with a satisfactory precision, these uncertainties almost entirely cancel out in the ratios of vector over pseudoscalar decay constants. These ratios may be thus predicted with very high accuracy due to the good control over the systematic uncertainties of the decay constants gained upon application of our hadron-parameter extraction algorithm. Our final results read $f_{B^*}/f_B=0.944\pm0.011_{\rm OPE}\pm0.018_{\rm syst}$ and $f_{B_s^*}/f_{B_s}=0.947\pm0.023_{\rm OPE}\pm0.020_{\rm syst}$. Thus, both $f_{B^*}/f_B$ and $f_{B_s^*}/f_{B_s}$ are less than unity at 2.5$σ$ and 2$σ$ level, respectively.
We constrain the possible bound-state solutions of the spinless Salpeter equation (the most obvious semirelativistic generalization of the nonrelativistic Schrödinger equation) with an interaction between the bound-state constituents given by the kink-like potential (a central potential of hyperbolic-tangent form) by formulating a bunch of very elementary boundary conditions to be satisfied by all solutions of the eigenvalue problem posed by a bound-state equation of this type, only to learn that all results produced by a procedure very much liked by some quantum-theory practitioners prove to be in severe conflict with our expectations.
We present the outcomes of a very recent investigation of the decay constants of nonstrange and strange heavy-light beauty vector mesons, with special emphasis on the ratio of any such decay constant to the decay constant of the corresponding pseudoscalar meson, by means of Borel-transformed QCD sum rules. Our results suggest that both these ratios are below unity.
Within the realm of QCD sum rules, one of the most important areas of application of this nonperturbative approach is the prediction of the decay constants of heavy mesons. However, in spite of the fact that, indisputably, the adopted techniques are, of course, very similar, we encounter rather dissimilar challenges, or obstacles, when extracting from two-point correlators of appropriate heavy-light currents interpolating the mesons, the characteristics of charmed mesons with different spin. In view of this, it seems worthwhile to us to revisit this issue for the case of charmed pseudoscalar mesons $D_{(s)}$ and vector mesons $D^*_{(s)}.$
Our recently completed analysis of the decay constants of both pseudoscalar and vector beauty mesons reveals that in the bottom-quark sector two specific features of the sum-rule predictions show up: (i) For the input value of the bottom-quark mass in the $\overline{\rm MS}$ scheme $\overline{m}_b(\overline{m}_b)\approx4.18\;\mbox{GeV},$ the sum-rule result $f_B\approx210$-$220\;\mbox{MeV}$ for the $B$ meson decay constant is substantially larger than the recent lattice-QCD finding $f_B\approx190\;\mbox{MeV}.$ Requiring QCD sum rules to reproduce the lattice-QCD value of $f_B$ yields a significantly larger $b$-quark mass: $\overline{m}_b(\overline{m}_b)=4.247\;\mbox{GeV}.$ (ii) Whereas QCD sum-rule predictions for the charmed-meson decay constants $f_D,$ $f_{D_s},$ $f_{D^*}$ and $f_{D_s^*}$ are practically independent of the choice of renormalization scale, in the beauty sector the results for the decay constants - and especially for the ratio $f_{B^*}/f_B$ - prove to be very sensitive to the specific scale setting.
Noticing renewed or increasing interest in the possibility to describe semirelativistic bound states (of either spin-zero constituents or, upon confining oneself to spin-averaged features, constituents with nonzero spin) by means of the spinless Salpeter equation generalizing the Schrödinger equation towards incorporation of effects caused by relativistic kinematics, we revisit this problem for interactions between bound-state constituents of Yukawa shape, by recalling and applying several well-known tools enabling to constrain the resulting spectra.
In view of the obstacles encountered in any attempts to solve the Minkowski-space Bethe-Salpeter equation for bound states of two fermions, we study the possibility to model the bound-state features, at least at a qualitative level, by a Schrödinger description. Such a nonrelativistic potential model can be constructed by applying, to any given Bethe-Salpeter spectral data, "geometric spectral inversion" in its recently extended form, which tolerates also singular potentials. This leads to the adaptation of explicit models that provide an overview accounting for the Bethe-Salpeter formalism's complexities.
The spinless Salpeter equation can be regarded as the eigenvalue equation of a Hamiltonian that involves the relativistic kinetic energy and therefore is, in general, a nonlocal operator. Accordingly, it is hard to find solutions of this bound-state equation by exclusively analytic means. Nevertheless, a lot of tools enables us to constrain the resulting bound-state spectra rigorously. We illustrate some of these techniques for the example of the Hulthén potential.
In spite of undeniable similarities of the applied techniques, somewhat different challenges are encountered when extracting, from QCD sum rules derived from two-point correlators of appropriate interpolating heavy-light quark currents, the decay constants of charmed mesons of pseudoscalar nature, on the one hand, or of vector nature, on the other hand. This observation justifies a rather careful reassessment of the corresponding results.