How we discovered the nonet of light scalar mesons

Abstract

As has been confirmed meanwhile by lattice-QCD calculations (see e.g. hep-lat/0702023), the confinement spectrum of non-exotic quark-antiquark systems has its ground state for scalar mesons well above 1 GeV in the Resonance Spectrum Expansion (RSE). For instance, in the S-wave Kaon-pion RSE amplitude, a broad resonance was predicted slightly above 1.4 GeV [hep-ex/0106077], which is confirmed by experiment as the K*0(1430). However, a complete nonet of light scalar mesons was predicted (Zeit.Phys.C30,615 [http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep?key=1573454]) as well, when a model strongly related to the RSE and initially developed to describe the heavy quarkonia resonance spectra (Phys.Rev.D21,772 [http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep?key=363162]) was applied in the light-quark sector. Thus, it was found that the light scalar-meson nonet constitutes part of the ordinary meson spectrum, albeit represented by "extraordinary" [hep-ph/0701038] poles [hep-ex/0106077]. Similar resonances and bound states appear in the charmed sector [hep-ph/0305035], and are predicted in the B-meson spectrum [hep-ph/0312078, hep-ph/0406242]. A recent work [hep-ph/0703286] confirmed the presence of light scalar-meson poles in the RSE amplitude for S-wave and P-wave pion-pion and Kaon-pion contributions to three-body decay processes measured by the BES, E791 and FOCUS collaborations.