The strong interactions of low-lying meson resonances (spin ~< 1) with the octet of pseudoscalar mesons (pi, K, n) are considered to lowest order in the derivative expansion of chiral SU(3). The resonance contributions to the coupling constants of the O(p 4) effective chiral lagrangian involving pseudoscaiar fields only are determined. These low-energy coupling constants are found to be dominated by the resonance contributions. Although we do not treat the vector and axial-vector mesons as gauge bosons of local clural symmetry, vector meson dominance emerges as a prominent result of our analysis. As a further application of chiral resonance couplings, we calculate the electromagnetic pion mass difference to lowest order in chiral perturbation theory with explicit resonance fields.

The work of one of us (A.P.) has been partly supported by CAICYT, Spain, under grant No. AE-0021. Work supported in part by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds.

32 páginas, 2 figuras, 5 tablas.-- BUTP-88-18 ; CERN-TH-5185-88 ; CPT-2158 ; UWTHPH-1988-29.

Peer reviewed