Retardation effects in the rotating string model

A new method to study the retardation effects in mesons is presented. Inspired from the covariant oscillator quark model, it is applied to the rotating string model in which a nonzero value is allowed for the relative time between the quark and the antiquark. The straight line ansatz is used to describe the string, and the relevance of this approximation is tested. This approach leads to a retardation term which behaves as a perturbation of the meson mass operator. It is shown that this term preserves the Regge trajectories for light mesons. As an illustration, we show that a satisfactory agreement with the experimental data can be obtained if the quark self-energy contribution is added. The consequences of the retardation on the Coulomb interaction and the wave function are also analyzed.