Systematics of the Light and Strange Baryons and the Symmetries of QCD

The spectra of the nucleons and the strange hyperons are well described by a harmonic confinement potential for the constituent quarks and an SU(3) flavor-symmetric interaction mediated by the pseudoscalar octet that is associated with the hidden approximate chiral symmetry of QCD. The spectrum is formed of multiplets of $SU(6)_{FS}\times U(6)_{conf}$, which are mixed by the octet interaction. With 4 matrix elements of the octet mediated interaction determined by the lowest mass splittings in the nucleon spectrum the resulting mass formula predicts the whole spectrum with an accuracy of $\sim$ 5\%.