Are There Oscillations in the Baryon/Meson Ratio?

Abstract

All available data indicate a surplus of baryon states over meson states for energies greater than about 1.5 GeV. Since hadron-scale string theory suggests that their numbers should become equal with increasing energy, it has recently been proposed that there must exist exotic mesons with masses just above 1.7 GeV in order to fill the deficit. We demonstrate that a string-like picture is actually consistent with the present numbers of baryon and meson states, and in fact predicts regular oscillations in their ratio. This suggests a different role for new hadronic states.