Unified Hamiltonian model for mesons and baryons

A new Hamiltonian model is introduced to study the spectrum of light hadrons. It combines relativistic field theory with elements of the constituent quark model. In addition to the standard linear confining and pseudoscalar meson exchange interactions with predetermined parameters, an additional interaction with different covariant spin structures is examined. Using a large scale Monte Carlo variational procedure, the resulting model Hamiltonian provides a very good, unified description of the light quark baryon (both octet and decuplet) and meson spectra.