pi^+ - pi^0 mass difference from the Bethe-Salpeter equation

Abstract

In the framework of the Schwinger-Dyson equation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation in the improved ladder approximation, we calculate the pi^+ - pi^0 mass difference on the same footing as the pion decay constant and the QCD S parameter (or L_{10}) through the difference between the vector current correlator \Pi_{VV} and the axial-vector current correlator \Pi_{AA}. We find that all the results can be fit to the experimental values for rather large Lambda_{QCD} \sim 700 MeV which reflects the ``scale ambiguity''. By fitting to the calculated data using the pole saturated form of \Pi_{VV} - \Pi_{AA}, we also derive masses and decay constants of rho meson and a_1 meson, which we found are consistent with the experiments rather insensitively to the ``scale ambiguity''.