The hadronic off-shell width of meson resonances

Abstract

Within the resonance chiral effective theory we study the dressed propagators of the spin-1 fields, as arise from a Dyson-Schwinger resummation perturbatively constructed from loop diagrams with absorptive contributions in the s-channel. We apply the procedure to the vector pion form factor and the elastic pion-pion scattering to obtain the off-shell width of the rho_0 meson. We adopt a definition of the off-shell width of spin-1 meson resonances that satisfies the requirements of analyticity, unitarity, chiral symmetry and asymptotic behaviour ruled by QCD. To fulfil these constraints the resummation procedure cannot consist only of self-energy diagrams. Our width definition is shown to be independent of the formulation used to describe the spin-1 meson resonances.

Comments: 1+12 pages, 4 figures. Minor changes in text. Conclusions unchanged. Version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D