Generalized hidden symmetry for low-energy hadron physics

We present a detailed study of an effective chiral meson lagrangian involving pseudoscalar, vector and axial-vector mesons. We employ the recently proposed technique to introduce vector and axial-vector mesons as composite gauge bosons of an extended hidden gauge symmetry of the non-linear σ-model. In particular, we write down the most general anomalous action (Wess-Zumino term) in accordance with low-energy theorems and chiral symmetry. The global flavor anomalies of QCD are given by the standard (5-dimensional) Wess-Zumino-Witten action of the pseudoscalar mesons, whereas all the processes violating natural parity for the vectors and axials are chirally (gauge) symmetric and therefore do not contribute to the Wess-Zumino anomaly equation. We find fourteen independent terms with a priori unknown (real) coefficients. We are able to fix some of these coefficients from anomalous hadronic and radiative vector/axial-vector meson decays. A comparison to the gauged Wess-Zumino action in the so-called massive Yang-Mills approach shows that both anomalous actions are indeed equivalent for a special choice of the unknown coefficients. We finally propose a realistic two-flavor chiral effective lagrangian incorporating pions, the vector mesons ρ and ω as well as the axial A₁ meson which should be used in skyrmion physics at energy scales up to about 1 GeV.