Investigating the nature of light scalar mesons with semileptonic decays of D mesons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nature of light scalar mesons through semileptonic D meson decays using a chiral unitarity approach, providing predictions for branching fractions and invariant mass distributions to clarify meson structures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of chiral unitarity in coupled channels to predict semileptonic D meson decay branching fractions involving light scalar and vector mesons.

Findings

Predicted branching fractions for various scalar meson decay modes.

Calculated invariant mass distributions to analyze meson structures.

Provided theoretical predictions to guide future experimental studies.

Abstract

We study the semileptonic decays of $D_{s}^{+}$, $D^{+}$, and $D^{0}$ mesons into the light scalar mesons [$f_{0} (500)$, $K_{0}^{\ast} (800)$, $f_{0} (980)$, and $a_{0}(980)$] and the light vector mesons [$\rho (770)$, $\omega (782)$, $K^{\ast} (892)$, and $\phi (1020)$]. With the help of a chiral unitarity approach in coupled channels, we compute the branching fractions for scalar meson processes of the semileptonic $D$ decays in a simple way. Using current known values of the branching fractions, we make predictions for the branching fractions of the semileptonic decay modes with other scalar and vector mesons. Furthermore, we calculate the $\pi ^{+} \pi ^{-}$, $\pi \eta$, $\pi K$, and $K^{+} K^{-}$ invariant mass distributions in the semileptonic decays of $D$ mesons, which will help us clarify the nature of the light scalar mesons.