Covariant confinement model for the study of the properties of light mesons - art. no. 025202

We continue our studies of a relativistic quark model that includes a covar iant model of confinement. [In the absence of the confinement model, our mo del reduces to the SU(3)-flavor version of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) mod el.] In previous works we have studied the radial excitations of the pion, eta-eta' mixing, and omega-phi mixing. Here we extend our work to study the K mesons of the pseudoscalar, vector, and scalar nonets. In addition, we p rovide some preliminary analysis of the P-3(1) and P-1(1) axial-vector none ts and develop a formalism that enables us to consider P-3(1)-P-1(1) mixing of the strange axial-vector mesons. That is accomplished by ism that enabl es us to consider adding interactions to the NJL Lagrangian that contain gr adients of the quark field. Once the parameters of the model are fixed by f itting the energies of the omega(782), omega(1420), K(495), and phi(1020), we find the model has significant predictive power. For example, the masses of the K*(892), K-o*(1430), and a(1)(1260) are predicted correctly. For th e pseudoscalar nonet we find nineteen states below 2 GeV and for the vector nonet we have eleven states with mass less than 2 GeV. On the whole, the p attern of radial excitations of the various mesons is reproduced in our mod el. [S0556-2813(99)01108-5].