Hadron Physics and the Dyson--Schwinger Equations of QCD

Abstract

We use the Bethe-Salpeter equation in rainbow-ladder truncation to calculate the ground state mesons from the chiral limit to bottomonium, with an effective interaction that was previously fitted to the chiral condensate and pion decay constant. Our results are in reasonable agreement with the data, as are the vector and pseudoscalar decay constants. The meson mass differences tend to become constant in the heavy-quark limit. We also present calculations for the pion and rho electromagnetic form factors, and for the single-quark form factors of the \eta_c and J/\psi.