TOTAL WIDTHS OF LIGHT HADRONS - AN INCLUSIVE VIEW

The total width of a q (q) over bar hadron is modeled by the rate at w hich it dissociates into a pair of quasifree quarks brought about by ' 'soft'' and ''hard'' gluon exchanges, under the ansatz of a short time zone for the existence of such a state. A crucial ingredient in this regard is the quark's mass function for which a nonperturbative formul a is obtained via dynamical breaking of the chiral symmetry of an inpu t vector-exchange-like four-fermion Lagrangian, facilitated by the kno wledge that for a chirally invariant Lagrangian this quantity is also equal to the pion-quark vertex function in the chiral limit (M(pi) dou ble right arrow 0). The mass function so employed is based on a Bethe- Salpeter (BS) model with a vector-exchange-like kernel (chirally invar iant) which is precalibrated to the spectroscopy of q (q) over bar and qqq hadrons, and also predicts a value of (q (q) over bar)(0) fully c onsistent with QCD sum rules. The predicted widths show a good overlap with available data from L > 1 to J = 5, while limitations of phase s pace resist applicability of the said mechanism due to the onset of ha dronic selection rules for certain L less than or equal to 1 states.