Excited Heavy-Light Systems and Hadronic Transitions

A detailed study of orbital and radial excited states in D, Ds, B and B_s systems is performed. The chiral quark model provides the framework for the calculation of pseudoscalar meson (pi, K, ...) hadronic transitions among heavy-light excited and ground states. To calculate the excited states masses and wavefunctions, we must resort to a relativistic quark model. Our model includes the leading order corrections in 1/m_(c,b) (e.g. mixing). Numerical results for masses and light hadronic transition rates are compared to existing experimental data. The effective coupling of the chiral quark model can be determined by comparing with independent results from lattice simulations (g^8_A = 0.53 +-/- 0.11) or fitting to known widths (g^8_A = 0.82 +-/- 0.09).