Quark Models and Quark Phenomenology

Abstract

Overwhelming experimental evidence for quarks as real physical constituents of hadrons along with the QCD analogs of the Balmer Formula, Bohr Atom and Schroedinger Equation already existed in 1966. A model of colored quarks interacting with a one-gluon-exchange potential explained the systematics of the meson and baryon spectrum and gave a hadron mass formula in surprising agreement with experiment. The simple quark model dismissed as heresy and witchcraft by the establishment predicted quantum numbers of an enormous number of hadronic states as well as relations between masses, reaction cross sections and electromagnetic properties, all unexplained by other approaches. Further developments leading to QCD included confinement in the large $N_c$ limit, duality, dual resonance and string models, high energy scattering systematics, unified treatment of mesons and baryons, no exotics and no free quarks.