Pseudoscalar mesons and their radial excitations from the effective chiral Lagrangian

The effective chiral Lagrangian is derived from QCD in the framework of the field correlator method. It contains the effects of both confinement and chiral symmetry breaking due to a special structure of the resulting quark mass operator. It is shown that this Lagrangian describes light pseudoscalar mesons, and Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relations for pions, eta and K mesons are reproduced. The spectrum of radial excitations of pions and K mesons is found and compared to experimentally known masses.