Heavy-light mesons beyond the ladder approximation

The heavy-light mesons are studied within the framework of Dyson-Schwinger equations of QCD. Inspired by the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity resulting from the chiral symmetry, we propose a truncation scheme beyond the ladder approximation without introducing any additional parameters. For the pseudoscalar and vector heavy-light mesons, the obtained mass spectrum has the level of relative errors at 5% compared with experimental data and lattice-QCD results. For the leptonic decay constants, our results are comparable with those from experiments and/or lattice QCD. For some channels, the discrepancies are sizable but significantly smaller than those using the equal spacing rule. The truncation scheme proposed in this work is simple and could be improved and applied to study other open flavor hadrons including both mesons and baryons.