Large Nc and Chiral Dynamics

We study the dependence on the number of colors of the leading pi pi scattering amplitude in chiral dynamics. We demonstrate the existence of a critical number of colors for and above which the low energy pi pi scattering amplitude computed from the simple sum of the current algebra and vector meson terms is crossing symmetric and unitary at leading order in a truncated and regularized 1/Nc expansion. The critical number of colors turns out to be Nc=6 and is insensitive to the explicit breaking of chiral symmetry. Below this critical value, an additional state is needed to enforce the unitarity bound; it is a broad one, most likely of "four quark" nature.Comment: RevTeX4, 6 fig., 5 page

eta' to eta pi pi Decay as a Probe of a Possible Lowest-Lying Scalar Nonet

We study the eta' to eta pi pi decay within an effective chiral Lagrangian approach in which the lowest lying scalar meson candidates sigma(560) and kappa(900) together with the f0(980) and a0(980) are combined into a possible nonet. We show that there exists a unique choice of the free parameters of this model which, in addition to fitting the pi pi and pi K scattering amplitudes, well describes the experimental measurements for the partial decay width of eta' to eta pi pi and the energy dependence of this decay. As a by-product, we estimate the a0(980) width to be 70 MeV, in agreement with a new experimental analysis.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure

Putative Light Scalar Nonet

We investigate the "family" relationship of a possible scalar nonet composed of the a_0(980), the f_0(980) and the \sigma and \kappa type states found in recent treatments of \pi\pi and \pi K scattering. We work in the effective Lagrangian framework, starting from terms which yield "ideal mixing" according to Okubo's original formulation. It is noted that there is another solution corresponding to dual ideal mixing which agrees with Jaffe's picture of scalars as qq\bar q \bar q states rather than as q\bar q states. At the Lagrangian level there is no difference in the formulation of the two cases (other than the numerical values of the coefficients). In order to agree with experiment, additional mass and coupling terms which break ideal mixing are included. The resulting model turns out to be closer to dual ideal mixing than to conventional ideal mixing; the scalar mixing angle is roughly -17 degrees in a convention where dual ideal mixing is 0 degrees.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure