Mesons with a Light Quark-Antiquark Pair and the Bethe-Salpeter Equation

The light quark-antiquark scattering Green's function is considered near a meson resonance peak. The Bethe-Salpeter equation is used to write formal expressions for the resonance width/mass ratio. Arguments are made concerning to what extent this ratio can be calculated perturbatively, and an upper bound is placed on the growth of this ratio as a function of radial excitation. Certain mesons and their radial excitations are considered, as well as the more general issue of classifying mesons in the quark model.