Towards meson spectroscopy instead of bump hunting

Mesonic resonances are generally observed in data as narrow, moderately broad, or wide peaks in scattering or production processes. In the eyes of nearly all experimentalists, any suchlike bump is a true resonance as soon as its statistical significance exceeds certain minimal values. However, this simple point of view ignores possible effects from competing hadronic channels and the opening of the corresponding thresholds. On the other hand, most theoretical hadron-model builders consider mesons merely bound states of a quark and an antiquark, or of more exotic combinations sometimes involving valence gluons as well. Also the latter description is much too naive, since considerable mass shifts or even the dynamical generation of extra states due to unquenching are equally ignored. present paper, a largely empirical yet very successful approach to meson spectroscopy is revisited, in which all the above phenomena can be accounted for non-perturbatively, with concrete examples of some enigmatic mesonic states described in detail. First, the X ( 4260 ) charmonium enhancement is argued to be a non-resonant structure resulting from depletion effects due to competing channels and resonances. Then, the X ( 3872 ) charmonium-like meson is described as a unitarised J P C = 1 + + c c ̄ state. Also, the unusual pattern of masses and widths of the open-charm axial-vector mesons D 1 ( 2420 ) , D 1 ( 2430 ) , D s 1 ( 2536 ) , and D s 1 ( 2460 )  is shown to follow from highly non-perturbative coupled-channel and mixing effects. Finally, first indications of a very light scalar boson are presented, on the basis of published BABAR data.