News from the light and strange meson sector

Abstract

Recent high-quality data sets from various experiments grant new insights into the excitation spectrum of light mesons, which are composed of up, down, and strange quarks. In the non-strange light-meson sector, many recent experimental and theory efforts are focused on the search for so-called exotic states, which are states beyond the na¨ıve constituent quark-model. To this end, various potential decay modes of exotic states are studied at experiments such as GlueX or COMPASS. In addition, there is recent progress in the understanding of so-called non-resonant processes, which act as background in searches for light mesons, as well as in the prediction of light mesons from lattice QCD. While the non-strange light-meson spectrum is already mapped out rather well, many predicted strange mesons have not yet been observed experimentally or need further confirmation. Recent high-precision data from experiments such as LHCb and BESIII allow us to study strange mesons in heavy-meson decays. Alternatively, strange mesons are studied in diffractive scattering of high-energy kaon beams. The so far world’s largest data set on the diffractively produced K−π −π + final state was measured by the COMPASS experiment. A recent analysis of this data covers a large variety of strange mesons over a wide mass range in a single, self-consistent analysis