Regge trajectories and quarkonium spectrum from a first principle Salpeter equation

Abstract

We compute the heavy-heavy, light-light and light-heavy quarkonium spectrum starting from a first principle Salpeter equation obtained in a preceding paper. We neglect spin-orbit structures and exclude from our treatment the light pseudoscalar states which in principle would require the use of the full Bethe-Salpeter equation due to the chiral symmetry breaking problem. For the rest we find an overall good agreement with the experimental data. In particular for the light-light case we find straight Regge trajectories with the right slope and intercepts. The strong coupling constant $\alpha_s$, the string tension $\sigma$ occurring in the potential and the heavy quark masses are taken from the heavy quarkonium semirelativistic fit with only a small rearrangement. The light quark masses are set equal to baricentral value of the current quark masses as reported by the particle data group. For what concerns the light-light and the light-heavy systems the calculation is essentially parameter free.