Evidence for Parity - SU ( 3 ) Mixing in Decays of Meson Resonances

Twenty years have passed since Tomonaga made his important contribution to quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics, although incomplete, is a triumph of quantum field theory applied to the electromagnetic interaction and has served as a model for dealing with the other particle interactions as well. The conspicuous lack of success in the domain of non-electromagnetic interactions has led to the replacement of the Lagrangian field theory method by such approaches as S matrix theory, Regge pole analysis, current algebras, etc. While these alternative methods for performing dynamical calculations have scored some impressive successes for a variety of problems in strong and weak interactions, they are essentially "phenomenological" in character and do not have a single coherent theoretical foundation. Indeed, it is fair to say that the more "phenomenological" approaches derive whatever validity they possess from some field-theoretical model. Under these circumstances and in view of the importance of establishing the underlying group structures for the various types of interactions in particle physics before dynamical calculations are undertaken, the Rochester group1) has attempted to employ the quark model as a probe of higher symmetries. For reasons which have been discussed in detail,2l the quark model with chiral decomposition is favored and the parity-SUs mixing group Ws (or S Ws) is of particular interest. As part of a systematic program to work out the consequences of this chiral group for hadrons, the mass relations for mesons have been derived8l on the basis of the underlying Ws (or SWs) group together with the well-defined tensor structures of the symmetry-breaking interactions predicted by the field-theoretic quark model. The promising results obtained for the meson masses have led us, in this paper, to investigate the predictions of the Ws (or SWs) theory for the (strong) decays of the meson resonances.