SU(3) BREAKING AND HIDDEN LOCAL SYMMETRY - ART. NO. 074006

We study the various existing implementations of SU(3) breaking in the hidden local symmetry model for the low energy hadronic sector follow ing a mechanism originally proposed by Bando, Kugo and Yamawaki (BKY). We pay particular attention to Hermiticity and current conservation. Following this, we present a new method for including symmetry breakin g effects which preserves the BKY mass relation among vector mesons. S ymmetry breaking (SB) necessarily requires a transformation of the pse udoscalar fields, which, following BKY, we refer to as field renormali zation. We examine the consequences of propagating this through all La grangian terms including the anomalous ones. We thus explore the conse quences of these various SE schemes for both charged and neutral pseud oscalar decay constants as measured in weak and anomalous decays respe ctively. [S0556-2821(98)05219-9]