Search

Beyond the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking scale light and strange baryons should be considered as systems of three constituent quarks with an effective confining interaction and a chiral interaction that is mediated by the octet of Goldstone bosons (pseudoscalar mesons) between the constituent quarks.

We describe light and strange baryons within the chiral constituent- quark model whose hyperfine interaction is provided by pseudoscalar meson exchange. We discuss the extension of the model to include vector and scalar meson exchanges.

We address the semirelativistic constituent-quark model with linear confinement and a hyperfine interaction deduced from Goldstone-boson exchange. In the version where the latter is represented by pseudoscalar meson exchange (π, K, η, η′) and restricted to the spin-spin component only a unified description of all light- and strange-baryon spectra is provided in close agreement with phenomenology. We discuss the extension of the model that includes also the tensor components of the pseudoscalar meson exchange and in addition vector-meson (ρ, ω, K *,o) and scalar-meson (σ) exchanges. A preliminary version thereof provides a description of the baryon spectra with similar good quality.