Meson spectrum on the light-cone

The light-cone Hamiltonian, incorporating the nonperturbative dynamics of the qq̄ system connected by the string is investigated numerically. The spectrum is shown to coincide with that of the center-of-mass Hamiltonian within the accuracy of computation, displaying the expected degeneracies of the string states, but an overall shift due to different treatment of Z-graphs is obtained. The nonperturbative wave functions are calculated directly from the light-cone Hamiltonian for the first time, thus allowing the explicit estimation of nonperturbative effects in the parton model language.