We show that the photoexcitation of the baryon antidecuplet, suggested by the soliton classification of low-lying baryons, is strongly suppressed on the proton target. The process occurs mostly on the neutron target. This qualitative prediction can be useful in identifying the non-exotic members of the antidecuplet in the known baryon spectrum. We also analyze the interrelation between photocouplings of various baryon multiplets in the soliton picture and in the nonrelativistic quark model.
1.The soliton picture of baryons suggests a certain classification scheme for the lowlying baryons. In this scheme various baryons appear as rotational excitations of the same classical object -soliton. In the case of three light flavours, the first two low-lying SU f l (3) multiplets are the octet and the decuplet, just the same as in the quark model and in reality. The third rotational excitation is an antidecuplet with spin 1/2. Probably the existence of the antidecuplet as the next SU f l (3) rotational excitation has been first pointed out at the ITEP Winter School (February, 1984), see Ref. [1]. Other early references for the antidecuplet include Refs. [2,3,4].In Fig. 1 we draw the SU f l (3) diagram (from Ref. [5]) for the suggested antidecuplet in the (T 3 , Y ) axes, indicating its naive quark content as well as the (octet baryon + octet meson) content. In addition to the lightest Z + , there is an exotic quadruplet of S = −2 baryons (we call them Ξ 3/2 ). In Ref.[5] the following mass formula for the members of the antidecuplet was obtained:Note that this "soliton" mass formula is, to some extent, counterintuitive from the point of view of the naive quark model. For instance, strange baryon (Z + ) appears to be lighter than the baryon with the nucleon quantum numbers. Up to now we were used to strange baryons being heavier than non-strange ones in a given multiplet. Also Z + having 4 light+s quark content is about 540 MeV lighter than Ξ − 3/2 with the quark content 3 light+2 s quarks. In the naive quark model one would expect the mass difference of about ∼150 MeV.
1The essential assumption made in Ref. [5] was the identification of the P 11 resonance, N(1710), with the nucleon-like member of the antidecuplet. The calculated decay modes of N(1710) were found to be in a reasonable agreement with the existing data. Note, however, that the data were not good enough to make a decisive conclusion. At least it seems that the standard non-relativistic SU(6) description of this state as a member of an octet, is in trouble with the data: the antidecuplet idea fits better. With the identification made in Ref. [5], the lightest exotic member of the antidecuplet is Z + (S = +1, Q = +1, T = 0) predicted to have the mass around 1530 MeV and the total width of less than 15 MeV. As it was discovered in Ref.[5] the exotic Z + should be anomalously narrow due to the specific interplay of the soliton rotational correction to the meson-baryon couplings. In particular it was shown in Ref.[5] that all these couplings tend to zero ...