  We point out that the very recent discoveries of BaBar (2317) and CLEO II
(2460) are consistent with the general pattern of spontaneous breaking of
chiral symmetry in hadrons built of heavy and light quarks, as originally
suggested by us in 1992, and independently by Bardeen and Hill in 1993. The
splitting between the chiral doublers follows from a mixing between the light
constituent quark mass and the velocity of the heavy quark, and vanishes for a
zero constituent quark mass. The general strictures of spontaneous chiral
symmetry breaking constrain the axial charges in the chiral multiplet, and
yield a mass splitting between the chiral doublers of about 345 MeV when the
pion coupling to the doublers is half its coupling to a free quark. The chiral
corrections are small. This phenomenon is generic and extends to all
heavy-light hadrons. We predict the mass splitting for the chiral doublers of
the excited mesons (D1,D2). We suggest that the heavy-light doubling can be
used to address issues of chiral symmetry restoration in dense and/or hot
hadronic matter. In particular, the relative splitting between D and D* mesons
and their chiral partners decreases in matter, with consequences on charmonium
evolution at RHIC.
