Radiative decays and transition form factors of strange mesons in the relativistic constituent quark model

Abstract

Motivated by the recent lattice QCD results indicating that the topological charge contribution to the flavor singlet axial vector current can be traded off by the constituent quark masses, we investigate the radiative decays of pseudoscalar (π,K, η, η′), vector (ρ,K*, ω, ϕ) and axial vector (A ₁) mesons using a simple relativistic constituent quark model. For both simplicity and relativity, we take advantage of the distinguished features in the light-cone quantization method: (1) the Fock-state expansion of meson wavefunctions are not contaminated by the vacuum fluctuation, (2) the assignment of meson quantum numbers are given by the Melosh transformation. Except the well-known constituent quark masses of (u,d,s) quarks and the spin-averaged meson masses, the only parameter in the model is the gaussian parameter β which determines the broadness (or sharpness) of radial wavefunction. The computed decay widths and the transition form factors of ρ, ω → π(η)γ*,K* →Kγ* andA ₁ → πγ* at 0≤Q ²≤5 GeV² and π⁰(η) → γ*γ at 0≤Q ²≤3 GeV² are in a remarkably good agreement with the experimental data and the result forA ⁺₁ → π₊ γ* transition is quite consistent with the experiments of pion scattering on a nucleus using Primakoff effect. This model is potentially useful in the cocktail analyses of the dilepton productions in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at SPS energies and a little above.