Unified approach to the study of light and heavy mesons in the framework of the vacuum-polarization-corrected potential model

Abstract

Phenomenological evidence from meson spectroscopy is presented to support the view that a unified description of bound light- and heavy-quark systems is possible within the scope of a nonrelativistic-potential-model approach. The vacuum-polarization-corrected potential with its confinement part in the form of an approximately equal admixture of vector and scalar components is found to be a suitable one for the purpose. The overall systematics of the predictions based on this potential model for the meson masses, fine-hyperfine splittings, leptonic decay widths, and the Regge slopes are observed to be consistent with the premise that the forces between quarks and antiquarks are independent of the quark flavors.