Testing confining potentials through meson/baryon hyperfine splittings

In this paper, we discuss a quantity that can be derived from the hadronic spectrum-the ratio between the color hyperfine splitting of a K meson and that of a Σ baryon. It is shown that within the constituent quark model this ratio depends only on the ratio of contact probabilities in the hadrons. We compute this ratio assuming several phenomenological potential models, and show that the best agreement with data is obtained from the Cornell potential − Coulomb + linear. Thus, the analysis of color hyperfine interactions corroborates the preference for the Cornell potential based on quarkonium spectra.