A symmetry-preserving treatment of a vector-vector contact interaction is used to study charmed heavy-light mesons. The contact interaction is a representation of nonperturbative kernels used in Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations of QCD. Th
e Dyson-Schwinger equation is solved for the $u,,d,,s$ and $c$ quark propagators and the bound-state Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes respecting spacetime-translation invariance and the Ward-Green-Takahashi identities associated with global symmetries of QCD are obtained to calculate masses and electroweak decay constants of the pseudoscalar $pi,,K$, $D$ and $D_s$ and vector $rho$, $K^*$, $D^*$, and $D^*_s$ mesons. The predictions of the model are in good agreement with available experimental and lattice QCD data.
We compute the masses of the pseudoscalar mesons $pi^+$ , $K^0$ and $D^+$ at finite temperature and baryon chemical potential. The computations are based on a symmetry- preserving Dyson-Schwinger equation treatment of a vector-vector four quark conta
ct interaction. The results found for the temperature dependence of the meson masses are in qualitative agreement with lattice QCD data and QCD sum rules calculations. The chemical potential dependence of the masses provide a novel prediction of the present computation.
We highlight Hermiticity issues in bound-state equations whose kernels are subject to a highly asymmetric mass and momentum distribution and whose eigenvalue spectrum becomes complex for radially excited states. We trace back the presence of imaginar
y components in the eigenvalues and wave functions to truncation artifacts and suggest how they can be eliminated in the case of charmed mesons. The solutions of the gap equation in the complex plane, which play a crucial role in the analytic structure of the Bethe-Salpeter kernel, are discussed for several interaction models and qualitatively and quantitatively compared to analytic continuations by means of complex-conjugate pole models fitted to real solutions.
