We review recent developments in the understanding of meson properties as solutions of the Bethe-Salpeter equation in rainbow-ladder truncation. Included are recent results for the pseudoscalar and vector meson masses and leptonic decay constants, ranging from pions up to cc bound states; extrapolation to bb states is explored. We also present a new and improved calculation of Fπ(Q 2 ) and an analysis of the πγγ transition form factor for both π(140) and π(1330). Lattice-QCD results for propagators and the quark-gluon vertex are analyzed, and the effects of quark-gluon vertex dressing and the three-gluon coupling upon meson masses are considered.
DYSON-SCHWINGER EQUATIONS OF QCDThe Dyson-Schwinger equations [DSEs] are the equations of motion of a quantum field theory. They form an infinite hierarchy of coupled integral equations for the Green's functions (n-point functions) of the theory. Bound states (mesons, baryons) appear as poles in the Green's functions. Thus, a study of the poles in n-point functions using the set of DSEs will tell us something about hadrons. For recent reviews on the DSEs and their use in hadron physics, see Refs. [1,2,3].
Quark propagatorThe exact DSE for the quark propagator is 1where D µν (q = k − p) is the renormalized dressed gluon propagator, and Γ i ν (k, p) is the renormalized dressed quark-gluon vertex. The notation k stands for Λ d 4 k/(2π) 4 . For divergent integrals a translationally invariant regularization is necessary; the regularization scale Λ is to be removed at the end of all calculations, after renormalization, and will be suppressed henceforth.1 We use Euclidean metric {γµ, γν } = 2δµν , γ † µ = γµ andThe solution of Eq. (1) can be written asrenormalized according to S(p) −1 = i / p + m(µ) at a sufficiently large spacelike µ 2 , with m(µ) the current quark mass at the scale µ. Both the propagator, S(p), and the vertex, Γ i µ depend on the quark flavor, although we have not indicated this explicitly. The renormalization constants Z 2 and Z 4 depend on the renormalization point and on the regularization mass-scale, but not on flavor: in our analysis we employ a flavor-independent renormalization scheme.
MesonsBound states correspond to poles in n-point functions: for example a meson appears as a pole in the 2-quark, 2-antiquark Green's function G (4) = 0|q 1 q 2q1q2 |0 . In the vicinity of a meson, i.e. in the neighborhood of P 2 = −M 2 with M being the meson mass, such a Green's function behaves likewhere P is the total 4-momentum of the meson, p o and p i are the momenta of the outgoing quark and incoming quark respectively, and similarly for k i and k o . Momentum conservation relates these momenta: