Mesons: Relativistic Bound States with String Tension

A systematic method of analysing Bethe-Salpeter equation using spectral representation for the relativistic bound state wave function is given. This has been explicitly applied in the context of perturbative QCD with string tension in the $1 \over N$ expansion. We show that there are only a few stable bound state mesons due to the small "threshold mass"(constituent mass) of quarks. The asymptotic properties of the bound states are analytically analysed. The spectrum is derived analytically and compared phenomenologically. Chiral symmetry breaking and PCAC results are demonstrated. We make a simple minded observation to determine the size of the bound states as a function of the energy of the boundstate.