Continuum QCD and light mesons

The ladder-rainbow truncation of the set of Dyson-Schwinger equations is used to study light mesons. The parameters in the effective interaction are constrained by the chiral condensate and f_\pi; the current quark masses are fitted to m_\pi and m_K. The dressed quark propagators are in qualitative agreement with recent lattice-QCD results at low q^2 while having the correct perturbative behavior at large q^2. The resulting vector meson masses are within 5% of the experimental values. The obtained electromagnetic form factors and strong and electroweak coupling constants are also in good agreement with the data. At finite temperature, this truncation leads to a mean-field chiral phase transition. The spatial pion mass is almost constant below this transition, but rises with T close to and above T_c. The mass of its chiral partner, an idealized sigma meson, decreases with T until T_c, where it becomes degenerate with the pion.