Chiral Quark-Soliton Model

The Chiral Quark-Soliton Model of nucleons is based on two ideas: 1) the major role of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in hadron physics and 2) the relevance of the large number of colours limit for the real world. In these lectures I review the theoretical foundations of the model, the physics involved, and some of applications. Contents: 1. How do we know chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken? 2. Low-energy limit of QCD from instantons 2.1. Some of the results 2.2. Instanton-induced interactions 2.3. Bosonization 2.4. Chiral lagrangian 3. Properties of the chiral lagrangian 3.1. Derivative expansion and interpolation formula 3.2. The Wess-Zumino term and the baryon number 4. The nucleon 4.1. Physical motivations 4.2. Nucleon mass: a functional of the pion field 4.3. Nucleon profile 4.4. Quantum numbers of baryons 4.5. Some applications 4.6. Nucleon structure functions 5. Conclusions