We analyze the neutral meson mixing by directly solving the dispersion relation obeyed by the mass and width differences of the two meson mass eigenstates. We solve for the parameters $x$ and $y$, proportional to the mass and width differences in the charm mixing, respectively, taking the box-diagram contributions to $x(s)$ and $y(s)$ at large mass squared $s$ of a fictitious $D$ meson as inputs. The SU(3) symmetry breaking is introduced through physical thresholds of different $D$ meson decay channels for $y(s)$. These threshold-dependent effects, acting like nonperturbative power corrections in QCD sum rules, stabilize the solutions of $y(s=m_D^2)$ with the $D$ meson mass $m_D$. We then calculate $x(s)$ through the dispersive integration of $y(s)$, and show that our predictions $x(m_D^2)\approx 0.21\%$ and $y(m_D^2)\approx 0.52\%$ are close to the data in both $CP$-conserving and $CP$-violating cases. It is observed that the channel containing di-kaon states provides the major source of SU(3) breaking, which enhances $x(m_D^2)$ and $y(m_D^2)$ by four orders of magnitude relative to the perturbative results. We also predict the coefficient ratio $q/p$ involved in the charm mixing with $|q/p|-1\approx 2\times 10^{-4}$ and $Arg(q/p)\approx 6\times 10^{-3}$ degrees, which can be scrutinized by precise future measurements. The formalism is extended to studies of the $B_{s(d)}$ meson mixing and the kaon mixing, and the small deviations of the obtained width differences from the perturbative inputs explain why the above mixing can be understood via short-distance dynamics. We claim that the puzzling charm mixing is attributed to the strong Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani suppression on perturbative contributions, instead of to breakdown of the quark-hadron duality, which occurs only at 15\% level.
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