Inverse mass hierarchy of light scalar mesons driven by anomaly-induced flavor breaking

We propose a novel mechanism to reproduce the observed mass hierarchy for scalar mesons lighter than 1 GeV (called the inverse hierarchy), regarding them as mesons made of a quark and an anti-quark ($q\bar{q}$ mesons). The source is provided by the SU(3) flavor-symmetry breaking induced by the U(1) axial anomaly. In particular, the anomaly term including the explicit chiral symmetry breaking plays a significant role in the light scalar meson spectrum. To be concrete, we construct a linear sigma model for scalar mesons of $q\bar{q}$ type together with their pseudoscalar chiral partners, including an anomaly-induced explicit chiral symmetry-breaking term. We find that, due to the proposed mechanism, the inverse hierarchy, i.e., $m\left[ a_0 (980) \right] \simeq m\left[ f_0 (980) \right] > m \left[ K_0^\ast (700) \right] > m \left[ f_0(500) \right]$, is indeed realized. Consequently, the quark content of $f_0 (500)$ is dominated by the isoscalar $\bar uu+ \bar dd$ component, and $f_0 (980)$ by the strange quark bilinear one, $s\bar{s}$.