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 non zero value is allowed for the relative time between the quark and the antiquark. 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, and 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.