Meson structure in a relativistic many-body approach

Results from an extensive relativistic many-body analysis utilizing a realistic effective QCD Hamiltonian are presented for the meson spectrum. A comparative numerical study of the BCS, Tamm-Dancoff (TDA), and RPA treatments provides new, significant insight into the condensate structure of the vacuum, the chiral symmetry governance of the pion, and the meson spin, orbital, and flavor mass splitting contributions. In contrast to a previous glueball application, substantial quantitative differences are computed between TDA and RPA for the light quark sector with the pion emerging as a Goldstone boson only in the RPA.