A heretical view on linear Regge trajectories

We discuss a possibility that linear Regge trajectories originate not from gluonic strings connecting quarks, as it is usually assumed, but from pion excitations of light hadrons. From this point of view, at large angular momenta both baryons and mesons lying on linear Regge trajectories are slowly rotating thick strings of pion field, giving rise to a universal slope computable from the pion decay constant. The finite resonance widths are mainly due to the semiclassical radiation of pion fields by the rotating elongated chiral solitons. Quantum fluctuations about the soliton determine a string theory which, being quantized, gives the quantum numbers for Regge trajectories.