As was first pointed out by Witten, a large number of colors ( N c ) leads to a simplification in the theory of baryon masses in that the quarks may be assumed to move in a mean field which can be found self-consistently. The interquark potential in such a description can be borrowed from the meson-sector phenomenology in the absence of an accurate evaluation of it from large-Nc quantum chromodynamics (QCD). We have camed out this program with such a potential due to Richardson, used often by workers in the meson sector. This potential has the advantage of incorporating the two main features of QCD: namely, confinement and asymptotic freedom. In view of the small number of parameters involved, the results agree surprisingly well with experiment for the case of three identical quarks.
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