Hadronic off-shell width of meson resonances -: art. no. 054014

Within the resonance chiral effective theory we study the dressed propagators of the spin-1 fields, which arise from a Dyson-Schwinger resummation perturbatively constructed from loop diagrams with absorptive contributions in the s channel. We apply the procedure to the vector pion form factor and elastic pi pi scattering to obtain the off-shell width of the rho(0) meson. We adopt a definition of the off-shell width of spin-1 meson resonances that satisfies the requirements of analyticity, unitarity, chiral symmetry, and asymptotic behavior ruled by QCD. To satisfy these constraints the resummation procedure cannot consist only of self-energy diagrams. Our width definition is shown to be independent of the formulation used to describe the spin-1 meson resonances.