Constructive evidence for flavor independence of the quark-antiquark potential

The masses and leptonic widths of vector mesons may be used to construct quark-antiquark potentials by means of an inverse-scattering method. This technique has been applied to the charmonium system. A corresponding potential has been constructed from $\Upsilon$ and ${\Upsilon }^{\prime }$ and found to be in substantial agreement with that constructed from $\psi$ and ${\psi }^{\prime }$ if the $\Upsilon$ is composed of a charge $-\frac{1}{3}$ quark and the corresponding antiquark. This agreement may be interpreted as evidence for flavor independence of the quark-antiquark potential. Predictions for a hypothetical $\zeta$ family of higher-lying vector mesons also are noted.