Chiral quark dynamics

by Reinhard Alkofer

These notes give an introduction to the description of hadrons, i.e., mesons and baryons, within a quark model based on a chirally invariant quantum field theory. Emphasis is put on a didactic approach intended for graduate students with some background on functional integral techniques. Starting from QCD a motivation of a specific form of the effective quark interaction is given. Functional integral bosonization leads to a theory describing successfully meson properties. It possesses solitonic solutions which are identified as baryons. Via functional integral techniques a Faddeev equation for baryons describing them as bound states of a diquark and a quark is derived. Finally, a unification of these two complementary pictures of baryons is proposed.