Quark Structure of Chiral Solitons

Book excerpt: There is a prejudice that the chiral soliton model of baryons is something orthogonal to the good old constituent quark models. In fact, it is the opposite: the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in strong interactions explains the appearance of massive constituent quarks of small size thus justifying the constituent quark models, in the first place. Chiral symmetry ensures that constituent quarks interact very strongly with the pseudoscalar fields. The ''chiral soliton'' is another word for the chiral field binding constituent quarks. We show how the old SU(6) quark wave functions follow from the ''soliton'', however, with computable relativistic corrections and additional quark-antiquark pairs. We also find the 5-quark wave function of the exotic baryon Theta+.