Meson Spectroscopy Instead of Bump Hunting

Description
Mesonic resonances are generally observed in data as narrow or broad peaks in scattering or production processes. In the eyes of nearly all experimentalists, any suchlike bump is a true resonance as soon as its statistical significance exceeds certain minimal values. However, this rather simplistic point of view ignores possible effects from competing hadronic channels and the opening of the corresponding thresholds. On the other hand, most theoretical meson-model builders consider mesons merely bound states of a quark and an antiquark, or of more exotic combinations sometimes involving valence gluons as well. Also the latter description is much too naive, since considerable mass shifts or even the dynamical generation of extra states due to unquenching are equally ignored. In this talk, I shall present a largely empirical yet very successful approach to meson spectroscopy, in which all the above phenomena can be accounted for non-perturbatively.
Organised by Maurizio Consoli