The rainbow truncation of the quark Dyson-Schwinger equation is combined with the ladder Bethe-Salpeter equation for the meson amplitudes and the dressed quark-photon vertex in a self-consistent Poincaré-invariant study of the pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors in impulse approximation. We demonstrate explicitly that the current is conserved in this approach and that the obtained results are independent of the momentum partitioning in the Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes. With model gluon parameters previously fixed by the chiral condensate, the pion mass and decay constant, and the kaon mass, the charge radii and spacelike form factors are found to be in good agreement with the experimental data.

• Received 5 May 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.62.055204