Meson spectroscopy with unitary coupled-channels model for heavy-meson decay into three mesons

Abstract

We develop a model for describing excited mesons decay into three mesons. The properties of the excited mesons can be extracted with this model. The model maintains the three-body unitarity that has been missed in previous data analyses based on the conventional isobar models. We study an importance of the three-body unitarity in extracting hadron properties from data. For this purpose, we use the unitary and isobar models to analyze the same pseudo data of gamma p -> pi+pi+pi-n, and extract the properties of excited mesons. We find a significant difference between the unitary and isobar models in the extracted properties of excited mesons, such as the mass, width and coupling strength to decay channels.