An introduction to the quark model

Understand

This document contains a review on the quark model, prepared for lectures at the Niccolo Cabeo School at Ferrara in May 2012.

• It includes some historical aspects, the spectral properties of the 2-body and 3-body Schroedinger operators applied to mesons and baryons, the link between meson and baryon spectra, the role of flavour independence, and the speculations about stable or metastable multiquarks.
• The analogies between few-charge systems and few-quark bound states will be underlined.