Relativistic treatment of the decay constants of light and heavy mesons

Novel relativistic expressions are used to calculate the weak decay constants of pseudoscalar and vector mesons within the constituent quark model. Meson wave functions satisfy the quasipotential equation with the complete relativistic potential. New contributions, coining from the negative-energy quark states, are substantial for the light mesons, significantly decrease the values of their decay constants and, thus, bring them into agreement with experiment. For heavy-light mesons these contribution are much less pronounced, but permit to reduce uncertainties of the predicted decay constants. Their values agree with the results of lattice calculations and experimental data. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.