Electromagnetic properties of heavy-light mesons

Abstract Within the Bethe–Salpeter framework, we present a computation of space-like electromagnetic form factors for pseudoscalar mesons, including light and heavy-light systems. Our approach employs a flavour-dependent variation of the standard Taylor effective charge, which contains key contributions from the quark-gluon vertices. This effective interaction is a common ingredient of all relevant dynamical equations, and accommodates the crucial mass differences between the various quark flavours. Particular attention is paid to the nonperturbative determination of the quark-photon vertex. The computed electromagnetic form factors for the pion and the kaon mesons show excellent agreement with experimental determinations. In addition, the predictions for the charge radii of heavy-light systems are in overall good agreement with lattice QCD.