Absence of gluonic components in axial and tensor mesons

A quarkonium–gluonium mixing scheme previously developed to describe the characteristic of the pseudoscalar mesons is applied to axial and tensor mesons. The parameters of the model are determined by fitting the eigenvalues of a mass matrix. The corresponding eigenvectors give the proportion of light quarks, strange quarks and glueball in each meson. However, the predictions of the model for the branching ratios and electromagnetic decays are incompatible with the experimental results. These results suggest the absence of gluonic components in the states of axial and tensor isosinglet mesons analyzed here. Received: 12 November 1999 / Revised version: 27 April 2000 / Published online: 9 August 2000