# Scalar meson exchange and the baryon spectrato appear in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum III, Jefferson Lab. (Newport News, USA) June 7-12, 1998 , World Scientific (Singapore)

## Abstract

We explore the role of a scalar meson exchange interaction between quarks in a semirelativistic constituent quark model where the quarks are subject to a linear confinement. We search for a variational solution and show that the gap between the $`N=1`$ band and the ground state $`N=0`$ band increases with the strength of the scalar meson exchange interaction potential. This result has good implications on the description of the low-lying baryon masses, especially on the Roper vs. negative-parity resonances ordering.

It has been suggested  that beyond the scale of spontaneous chiral sypmmetry breaking, nonstrange and strange baryons can be viewed as systems of three quarks interacting via exchange of Goldstone bosons (pseudoscalar mesons). It has also been shown that a properly parametrized interaction provides good baryon spectra with a correct order of positive and negative parity levels both in a nonrelativistic  or a semirelativistic  treatment. In both parametrizations the pseudoscalar meson exchange interaction has two distinct parts: a long-range Yukawa potential tail and a short-range part having opposite sign as compared to the Yukawa potential tail. It is the latter which plays a major role in describing the baryon spectra in the frame of Goldstone boson exchange (GBE) models.

Although the models  are thought to be a consequence of the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, the chiral partner of the pion, the sigma meson, is not considered explicitly. One can think of having mocked up its contribution in the parameters of the Hamiltonian , e.g. in the regularization parameter of the short-range spin-spin term. The price which could have been paid is the large role played by the $`\eta ^{}`$ meson exchange which comes into the interaction with a strength $`g_0^2/4\pi `$ about equal  or larger  than the strength $`g_8^2/4\pi `$ associated with the pseudoscalar octet $`(\pi ,K,\eta )`$.

Here we study the explicit role of a sigma-exchange interaction by considering the following Hamiltonian

$$H_0=\underset{i}{}\left(m_i^2+p_i^2\right)^{1/2}+\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\sigma }\underset{i<j}{}|\stackrel{}{r}_i\stackrel{}{r}_j|\frac{g_\sigma ^2}{4\pi }\underset{i<j}{}\frac{exp\left[\mu _\sigma |\stackrel{}{r}_i\stackrel{}{r}_j|\right]}{|\stackrel{}{r}_i\stackrel{}{r}_j|}$$
(1)   
where the second term is the confinement potential with a strength tension 

$$\sqrt{\sigma }=1GeVfm^1$$
(2)   
$`\mu _\sigma `$ = 600 MeV is the sigma meson mass and $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi `$ is the coupling constant sigma-quark, taken as a variable parameter. From the pion-nucleon coupling constant $`g_{\pi NN}^2/4\pi `$ 14, one obtains a pion-quark coupling constant $`g_{\pi qq}^2/4\pi `$ = 0.67 which has been used in . Assuming a sigma-nucleon coupling $`g_{\sigma NN}^2/4\pi `$ 8  one obtains, by scaling, $`g_{\sigma qq}^2/4\pi `$ 0.4. In the following we study the role of the $`\sigma `$-meson exchange by considering values of $`g_{\sigma qq}^2/4\pi `$ up to 0.2. A qualitative argument that the $`\sigma `$-meson contributes attractively in (1) is that we view it as a two correlated pions, as in the nucleon-nucleon interaction. Moreover, one can consider more sophisticated arguments related to the differences appearing in the scalar and pseudoscalar propagators  in a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. From there one can argue that the Fourier transform would lead to a Yukawa + a contact term for a scalar and a Yukawa - a contact term, for a pseudoscalar exchange, as in Refs. . Due to the addition of the long and short range contributions in the scalar case, here we consider a simplified form of the $`\sigma `$-exchange potential, containing a single term as in (1).

The variational wave function has the form

$$\psi _n(\stackrel{}{r}_{12},\stackrel{}{r}_{13},\stackrel{}{r}_{23})=F_{123}\left[\underset{i<j}{}f\left(r_{ij}\right)\varphi _n(\stackrel{}{r}_{12},\stackrel{}{r}_{13},\stackrel{}{r}_{13})\right].$$
(3)   
where $`f`$ and $`F_{123}`$ are two- and three-body parts of the ground state wave function and $`\mathrm{\Phi }_n`$ with $`n0`$ contain orbital excitations . The function $`f`$ is parametrized as

$$\begin{array}{c}f\left(r\right)=r^\delta exp\left\{W\left(r\right)\gamma _1r\left[1W\left(r\right)\right]\gamma _{1.5}r^{1.5}\right\},\\ W\left(r\right)=\frac{1+exp\left(r_0/a\right)}{1+exp\left[\left(rr_0\right)/a\right]}\end{array}$$
(4)   
The three-body part is chosen as

$$F_{123}=\left[1\beta \sqrt{\sigma }\left(\underset{i}{}r_{i4}\frac{1}{2}\underset{i<j}{}r_{ij}\right)\right].$$
(5)   
The quantities $`\gamma _1`$, $`\gamma _{1.5}`$, $`a`$, $`r_0`$, $`\delta `$ and $`\beta `$ are variational parameters. In the minimization procedure we found that the ground state expectation value of (1) varies smoothly with all these parameters but $`\delta `$. It is quite natural because $`\delta `$ cares for the behaviour of the wave function near the origin, typical for the solution of a relativistic equation with a singular potential. The larger the coupling constant $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi `$ the more difficult in reaching the minimum. The expectation value for the first two excited states are obtained with the optimal values of the ground state parameters. The result is exhibited in the table below.

| $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi `$ | ground st. | neg.parity | radial excit. |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 0.00 | 940 | 1287 | 1446 |
| 0.05 | 940 | 1309 | 1444 |
| 0.10 | 940 | 1333 | 1444 |
| 0.15 | 940 | 1380 | 1445 |
| 0.20 | 940 | 1431 | 1446 |

One can see that the mass difference between the first radially excited state and the negative parity state is positive up to the coupling constant value of 0.20 but tends to vanish. Note also that the difference between the radially excited state and the ground state remains practically constant as a function of the coupling constant, while the mass difference between the orbitally excited state and the ground state increases with $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi `$. The reason for this is that at $`g_\sigma 0`$ all $`s`$ states are lowered with respect to the $`p`$ states. The wave function of the latter is small around the origin, so that it reduces some of the attraction in the expectation value.

Preliminary results indicate that the mass difference between the first radially excited state and the negative parity state becomes negative for $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi >0.20`$. This is precisely the desired behaviour for reproducing the correct order of the experimental spectrum, as in Ref. . These calculations indicate that a model incorporating a potential, whose Laplacian is negative in a region around the origin, can yield the right ordering of the lowest positive and negative parity states. For the potential of Eq. (1) such a situation is achieved for suitable values of the coupling constant $`g_\sigma ^2/4\pi `$. The Laplacian is related to the concavity of the two-body potential as discussed in Ref. .

The conclusion is that Goldstone boson exchange models should include explicitly the chiral partner of the pseudoscalar mesons. It might be misleading to mock up its effect in some nontrivial parameters of the model. We are presently studying the case of a potential with both scalar and pseudoscalar terms. However the question still remains about the role of the chromomagnetic interaction.

Finally, the scalar exchange term, which we have shown to be important for the level ordering, might also genearate a new spin-orbit contribution. It would be interesting to see whether or not that contribution could significantly improve our present knowledge of the spin-orbit problem in baryons .