Light meson radial Regge trajectories

A new physical mechanism is suggested to explain the universal depletion of high meson excitations. It takes into account the appearance of holes inside the string world sheet due to $q\overline{q}$ pair creation when the length of the string exceeds the critical value $R_1\simeq 1.4\hspace{0.5em}\mathrm{fm}$. It is argued that a delicate balance between large $N_c$ loop suppression and a favorable gain in the action, produced by holes, creates a new metastable (predecay) stage with a renormalized string tension which now depends on the separation r. This results in smaller values of the slope of the radial Regge trajectories, in good agreement with the analysis of experimental data of Anisovich, Anisovich, and Sarantsev.