Towards a realistic description of hadron resonances

We report on our attempts of treating excited hadron states as true quantum resonances. Hitherto the spectroscopy of mesons, usually considered as quark-antiquark systems, and of baryons, usually considered as three-quark systems, has been treated through excitation spectra of bound states (namely, confined few-quark systems), corresponding to poles of the quantum-mechanical resolvent at real negative values in the complex energy plane. As a result the wave functions, i.e. the residua of the resolvent, have not exhibited the behaviour as required for hadron resonances with their multiple decay modes. This has led to disturbing shortcomings in the description of hadronic resonance phenomena. We have aimed at a more realistic description of hadron resonances within relativistic constituent-quark models taking into account explicitly meson-decay channels. The corresponding coupled-channels theory is based on a relativistically invariant mass operator capable of producing hadron ground states with real energies and hadron resonances with complex energies, the latter corresponding to poles in the lower half-plane of the unphysical sheet of the complex energy plane. So far we have demonstrated the feasibility of the coupled-channels approach to hadron resonances along model calculations producing indeed the desired properties. The corresponding spectral properties will be discussed in this contribution. More refined studies are under way towards constructing a coupled-channels relativistic constituent-quark model for meson and baryon resonances.