Probing the quark–gluon interaction with hadrons

We present a unified picture of mesons and baryons in the Dyson–Schwinger/Bethe–Salpeter approach, wherein the quark–gluon and quark–(anti)quark interactions follow from a systematic truncation of the QCD effective action and include all its tensor structures. The masses of some of the ground-state mesons and baryons are found to be in reasonable agreement with the expectations of a ‘quark-core calculation’, suggesting a partial insensitivity to the details of the quark–gluon interaction. However, discrepancies remain in the meson sector, and for excited baryons, that suggest higher order corrections are relevant and should be investigated following the methods outlined herein.