Possible relations among the meson-baryon coupling constants

Abstract

It is assumed that the strong interactions of the mesons and baryons can be described in terms of a Lagrangian containing at most eight coupling constants. A simple assumption is then made that only one magnitude g is required to describe all the pion-baryon couplings and that one magnitude f is sufficient to describe the couplings of the baryons to K-mesons. Within this restriction, there are 3 8 = 6561 ways to write down the Lagrangian, since each of the eight coupling constants may be positive, negative, or absent. It is shown that many of these possiblities lead to equivalent descriptions of the strong interactions, and that still other possibilities lead to predictions in contradiction to experiment. However, several hundred nonequivalent Lagrangians satisfying the assumptions are not eliminated by the arguments of this paper. Examination of a number of the remaining possibilities in fourthorder perturbation theory indicates that some of them are more likely than others, but none can be ruled out by the arguments given here.