Pion mass and its decay constant have been studied in a chiral symmetric potential model of independent quarks. The non-perturbative multi-gluon interaction which is responsible for quark confinement in a hadron is phenomenologically represented here by an effective potentialU(r) = 1/2(1 +γ⁰)(ar² +V₀). The residual interactions due to quark-pion coupling arising out of the chiral symmetry preservation and that due to quark-gluon coupling arising out of single-gluon exchange are treated as low order perturbations. The centre of mass correction is also taken into account appropriately. This leads to the$$(q\bar q) - pion$$ mass in consistency with that of the PCAC-pion and the pion decay constant in reasonable agreement with experiment.

We investigate the weak leptonic decays of light and heavy pseudoscalar mesons in a relativistic quark model of independent quarks. We perform a static calculation of the decay constantf_M purely on grounds of simplicity. In order to minimize the possible uncertainty in the static calculation, we estimate the ratios of the decay constants which are found to be in good agreement, in the heavy flavor sector, with the predictions of other models available in the literature and existing experimental data. However, there is a noticeable discrepancy in the current prediction for pion decay constant which demonstrates the inherent limitations of the static approximation in the study of non-strange light mesons.