THE CHIRAL QUARK MODEL AND BARYON PHENOMENOLOGY

The chiral quark model posits that pions couple to the axial current of constituent quarks. This chiral pion coupling governs the pion decays of baryon resonances and also implies pion and multipion interactions between the quarks. The qualitative features of this model for the description of pionic decay widths and baryon spectra are outlined. When the covariant quark model wave function for the nucleon is chosen so as to describe the empirical nucleon form factors the pion decay widths of the positive parity resonances are underpredicted. This indicates the presence of significant multiquark components in these resonances.