Study of Heavy Meson Masses Using Spin-Dependent Potentials

Abstract

Heavy mesons are among the most useful hadronic systems for studying the interaction between quarks in the nonperturbative region of quantum chromodynamics. In particular, heavy quarkonium systems such as charmonium  and bottomonium  provide a comparatively clean environment for testing phenomenological quark–antiquark potentials, because the heavy constituent quarks move more slowly than light quarks and can often be treated within nonrelativistic or semirelativistic frameworks. This article investigates the mass spectra of heavy mesons using spin-dependent potentials. The meson is modeled as a two-body bound state composed of a quark and an antiquark. The total mass is obtained from the constituent quark masses together with the binding energy generated by the interaction potential. Several phenomenological potentials are discussed, including the Martin potential, Song–Lin potential, Turin potential, logarithmic potential, and Cornell-type quark–antiquark potential. The spin-independent part of the potential describes short-range Coulomb-like attraction and long-range confinement, while the spin-dependent part accounts for hyperfine, spin–orbit, and tensor splittings. These corrections are essential for distinguishing pseudoscalar and vector states such as ​  and  , as well as  and . The article shows that spin-dependent potential models remain valuable tools for describing heavy meson spectroscopy, especially when their predictions are compared with experimental data and established theoretical studies..                                                                                  

Keywords: heavy mesons, heavy quarkonium, charmonium, bottomonium, spin-dependent potential, quark–antiquark model, hyperfine splitting, meson spectroscopy.