Constructive evidence for flavor independence of the quark-antiquark potential

The masses and leptonic widths of vector mesons may be used to construct quark-antiquark potentials by means of an inverse-scattering method. This technique has been applied to the charmonium system. A corresponding potential has been constructed from UPSILON and UPSILON' and found to be in substantial agreement with that constructed from psi and psi' if the UPSILON is composed of a charge -1/3 quark and the corresponding antiquark. This agreement may be interpreted as evidence for flavor independence of the quark-antiquark potential. Predictions for a hypothetical zeta family of higher-lying vector mesons also are noted.