Electric Polarizability of Mesons in Semirelativistic Quark Models

The electric polarizability of mesons, in particular, that of the charged pion, is studied in the framework of a semirelativistic description of hadrons as bound states of valence quarks in terms of a Hamiltonian composed of the relativistic kinetic energy as well as a phenomenological potential describing the strong interactions between the quarks. The quark-core contribution to the electric polarizability obtainable in quark models of this kind turns out to be in the semirelativistic approaches even smaller than in the nonrelativistic limit.