Breaking flavour symmetry spontaneously

A new mechanism for spontaneous breaking of flavour symmetry is demonstrated, An exactly flavour symmetric model with degenerate bare nonets and with sufficiently strong tri-linear meson couplings is shown to lead to approximate self-consistency equations which are unstable. Instead there exists a stable solution, which break flavour symmetry spontaneously in the mass spectrum. For a C-degenerate meson spectrum the stable mass spectrum obeys the Okubo-Zweig-Iizuka (OZI) rule and the approximate equal spacing rule. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.