Chiral ward identities, effective actions and meson-glueball mixing

The low-energy spectrum of 1⁺ and 0^- mesons in one-flavour QCS is investigated. It is shown that there exist two light pseudoscalar mesons, which are linear combinations of pure quark and pure glueball states. Simple relations implied by the axial anomaly for their decay constants are confirmed. The mass generation mechanism for the lightest pseudoscalar meson is identified as due to the mixing of the operators iψγ₅ψ and (- g² 16π²)^*F_μν^aF^aμν, and the U(1) problem in this model is resolved. To establish these results, new functional methods are developed to determine the effective action for the appropriate fields in a low-energy approximation. A novel feature of our work is the introduction of a "symmetric" effective action, defined using a non-standard Legendre transform. The anomalous chiral Ward identities imply a simple invariance property for this functional, enabling it to be constructed in a particularly systematic way. Finally, the relation of our general results to the literature on effective lagrangians in the 1 N approximation is discussed.