Unified covariant treatment of hyperfine splitting for heavy and light mesons

TL;DR

This paper develops a covariant relativistic model for quark-antiquark systems, accurately predicting meson spectra across heavy and light mesons by incorporating hyperfine interactions via the Breit term.

Contribution

It introduces a fully covariant framework for meson modeling that unifies the treatment of heavy and light mesons, improving agreement with experimental data.

Findings

Accurate heavy meson mass predictions

Successful light meson spectrum explanation

Covariance and hyperfine splitting suffice for meson spectra

Abstract

This paper aims at proving the fundamental role of a relativistic formulation for quarkonia models. We present a completely covariant description of a two-quark system interacting by the Cornell potential with a Breit term describing the hyperfine splitting. Using an appropriate procedure to calculate the Breit correction, we find heavy meson masses in excellent agreement with experimental data. Moreover, also when applied to light quarks and even taking average values of the running coupling constant, we prove that covariance properties and hyperfine splitting are sufficient to explain the light mesons spectrum and to give a very good agreement with the data.