Effective Potential Models for Hadrons

The aim of these lectures is to give a self-contained introduction to nonrelativistic potential models, to their formulation as well as to their possible applications. At the price of some lack of (in a mathematical sense) rigorous derivations, we try to give a feeling and understanding for the simplest conceivable method to extract the explicit form of the forces acting between quarks from the interplay between experimental observations and theoretical considerations. According to this spirit, we demonstrate, in detail, how to obtain the underlying Hamiltonian and how to determine the Lorentz structure of the quark--(anti-)quark interaction potential from well-established experimental facts.