Is the spectrum of highly excited mesons purely coulombian?

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a static central potential, influenced by string breaking, accurately describes the spectrum of highly excited light mesons, resulting in a Coulomb-like energy spectrum.

Contribution

It shows that string breaking causes the meson potential to become Coulombic at large distances, providing a new understanding of meson spectra.

Findings

Coulombian spectrum matches highly excited mesons

String breaking alters the potential at large distances

Applicable to various meson sectors

Abstract

We show that a static central potential may provide a precise description of highly excited light unflavoured mesons. Due to string breaking this potential becomes of chromoelectric type at sufficiently large quark-antiquark distances giving rise to a coulombian spectrum. The same conclusion can be inferred for any other meson sector through a straightforward extension of our analysis.