Effective chiral lagrangians with an SU (3)-broken vector-meson sector

The accuracy of effective chiral lagrangians with vector-mesons as (hidden symmetry) gauge fields is shown to be improved by including SU(3)-breaking in the vector-meson sector. The masses (MV), couplings to the photon field (fVγ) and pseudoscalar pairs (gVPP) are all consistently described in terms of two parameters, which also fit the values for the pseudoscalar decay-constants, fP, and charge radii, 〈r2P〉. The description of the latter is further improved when working in the context of chiral perturbation theory.