Applications of two-body Dirac equations to the meson spectrum with three versus two covariant interactions, SU(3) mixing, and comparison to a quasipotential approach

In a previous paper, Crater and Van Alstine applied the two-body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics to quark-antiquark bound states using a relativistic extention of the Adler-Piran potential and compared their spectral results to those from other approaches which also considered meson spectroscopy as a whole and not in parts. In this paper, we explore in more detail the differences and similarities in an important subset of those approaches, the quasipotential approach. In the earlier paper, the transformation properties of the quark-antiquark potentials were limited to a scalar and an electromagnetic-like four-vector, with the former accounting for the confining aspects of the overall potential, and the latter the short range portion. The static Adler-Piran potential was first given an invariant form and then apportioned between those two different types of potentials. Here, we make a change in this apportionment that leads to a substantial improvement in the resultant spectroscopy by including a timelike confining vector potential over and above the scalar confining one and the electromagnetic-like vector potential. Our fit includes 19 more mesons than the earlier results and we modify the scalar portion of the potential in such a way that allows this formalism to account for the isoscalar mesons η and η^' not included in the previous work. Continuing the comparisons of formalisms and spectral results made in the previous paper with other approaches to meson spectroscopy, we examine in this paper the quasipotential approach of Ebert, Faustov, and Galkin.