We study ground and radial excitations of flavor singlet and flavored pseudoscalar mesons within the framework of the rainbow-ladder truncation using an infrared massive and finite interaction in agreement with recent results for the gluon-dressing function from lattice QCD and Dyson-Schwinger equations. Whereas the ground-state masses and decay constants of the light mesons as well as charmonia are well described, we confirm previous observations that this truncation is inadequate to provide realistic predictions for the spectrum of excited and exotic states. Moreover, we find a complex conjugate pair of eigenvalues for the excited $D_{(s)}$ mesons, which indicates a non-Hermiticity of the interaction kernel in the case of heavy-light systems and the present truncation. Nevertheless, limiting ourselves to the leading contributions of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes, we find a reasonable description of the charmed ground states and their respective decay constants.

The simultaneous investigation of the pion electromagnetic form factor in the space- and timelike regions within a light-front model allows one to address the issue of nonvalence components of the pion and photon wave functions. Our relativistic approach is based on a microscopic vector-meson-dominance model for the dressed vertex where a photon decays in a quark-antiquark pair, and on a simple parametrization for the emission or absorption of a pion by a quark. The results show an excellent agreement in the space like region up to $-10(\mathrm{GeV}/c{)}^2$, while in timelike region the model produces reasonable results up to $10(\mathrm{GeV}/c{)}^2$.

For the first time, a phenomenological analysis of the experimental electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon, both in the timelike and spacelike regions, is performed by taking into account the effects of nonvalence components in the nucleon state, within a light-front framework. Our model, based on suitable ansatzes for the nucleon Bethe–Salpeter amplitude and a microscopic version of the well-known Vector Meson Dominance model, has only four adjusted parameters (determined by the spacelike data with χ2/datum∼1.7), and yields a nice description of the experimental electromagnetic form factors in the physical region in the range −30(GeV/c)2