No radial excitations in low energy QCD. I. Diquarks and classification of mesons

We propose a new schematic model for mesons in which the building blocks are quarks and flavor-antisymmetric diquarks. The outcome is a new classification of the entire meson spectrum into quark–antiquark and diquark–antidiquark states which does not give rise to a radial quantum number: all mesons which have so far been believed to be radially excited are orbitally excited diquark–antidiquark states; similarly, there are no radially excited baryons. Further, mesons that were previously viewed as “exotic” are no longer exotic as they are now naturally integrated into the classification as diquark–antidiquark states. The classification also leads to the introduction of isorons (iso-hadrons), which are analogs of atomic isotopes, and their magic quantum numbers, which are analogs of the magic numbers of the nuclear shell model. The magic quantum numbers of isorons match the quantum numbers expected for low-lying glueballs in lattice QCD. We observe that interquark forces in mesons behave substantially differently from those in baryons: qualitatively, they are color–magnetic in mesons but color–electrostatic in baryons. We comment on potential models and the hydrogen atom. The implications of our results for confinement, asymptotic freedom, and a new set of relations between two fundamental properties of hadrons—their size and their energy—are discussed in our companion paper (Eur. Phys. J. C (2013). doi:10.1140/epjc/110052-013-2299-8).