We consider the chiral Lagrangian with a nonet of Goldstone bosons and a nonet of light vector mesons. The mixing between the pseudoscalar mesons eta and eta-prime is taken into account. A novel counting scheme is suggested that is based on hadrogene
sis, which conjectures a mass gap in the meson spectrum of QCD in the limit of a large number of colors. Such a mass gap would justify to consider the vector mesons and the eta-prime meson as light degrees of freedom. The complete leading order Lagrangian is constructed and discussed. As a first application it is tested against electromagnetic transitions of light vector mesons to pseudoscalar mesons. Our parameters are determined by the experimental data on photon decays of the omega, phi and eta-prime meson. In terms of such parameters we predict the corresponding decays into virtual photons with either dielectrons or dimuons in the final state.
It is argued that the chiral partners of the lowest-lying hadrons are hadronic molecules and not three-quark or quark-antiquark states, respectively. As an example the case of a_1 as the chiral partner of the rho is discussed. Deconfinement -- or as
a precursor large in-medium widths for hadronic states -- is proposed as a natural way to accommodate for the fact that at chiral restoration the respective in-medium spectra of chiral partners must become degenerate. Ingredients for a systematic and self-consistent in-medium calculation are presented with special emphasis on vector-meson dominance which emerges from a recently proposed systematic counting scheme for the mesonic sector including pseudoscalar and vector mesons as active degrees of freedom.
The decays of light vector mesons into three pseudoscalar mesons are calculated to leading order in the recently proposed counting scheme that is based on the hadrogenesis conjecture. Fully differential as well as integrated decay widths are presente
d. Since the required parameters have been fixed by other processes, the considered three-body decays are predictions of the presented approach. The decay width of the omega meson into three pions agrees very well with experiment. The partial decay widths of the K^* into its three K-pi-pi channels are predicted.
The isovector--vector and the isovector--axial-vector current are related by a chiral transformation. These currents can be called chiral partners at the fundamental level. In a world where chiral symmetry was not broken, the corresponding current-cu
rrent correlators would show the same spectral information. In the real world chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. A prominent peak -- the rho-meson -- shows up in the vector spectrum (measured in (e^+ e^-)-collisions and tau-decays). On the other hand, in the axial-vector spectrum a broad bump appears -- the a_1-meson (also accessible in tau-decays). It is tempting to call rho and a_1 chiral partners at the hadronic level. Strong indications are brought forward that these ``chiral partners do not only differ in mass but even in their nature: The rho-meson appears dominantly as a quark-antiquark state with small modifications from an attractive pion-pion interaction. The a_1-meson, on the other hand, can be understood as a meson-molecule state mainly formed by the attractive interaction between pion and rho-meson. A key issue here is that the meson-meson interactions are fixed by chiral symmetry breaking. It is demonstrated that one can understand the vector and the axial-vector spectrum very well within this interpretation. It is also shown that the opposite cases, namely rho as a pion-pion molecule or a_1 as a quark-antiquark state lead to less satisfying results. Finally speculations on possible in-medium changes of hadron properties are presented.
