UNIFIED DESCRIPTION OF LIGHT-BARYON AND STRANGE-BARYON SPECTRA - ART.NO. 094030

We present a chiral constituent-quark model for light and strange bary ons providing a unified description of their ground states and excitat ion spectra. The model relies on constituent quarks and Goldstone boso ns arising as effective degrees of freedom of low-energy QCD from the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry: The spectra of the three-quar k systems are obtained from a precise variational solution of a Schrod inger-type equation with a semirelativistic Hamiltonian. The theoretic al predictions are found to be in close agreement with experiment. [S0 556-2821(98)02619-8].