Understanding baryons from first principles

We obtain an understanding of baryons and anti-baryons in the strong coupling regime (κ << 1, where κ is the hopping parameter) of Euclidean lattice QCD. It is shown that they arise as tightly bound, bound states of three (anti-)quarks. The appearance of each of these particles is manifested by the occurence of an isolated dispersion curve (upper gap property) in the energymomentum spectrum, with asymptotic mass of order −3 ln κ. The upper gap property holds in the full gauge invariant (anti-)baryon space of states, at least up to −4 ln κ. Besides, we establish a spectral representation for the two-point baryon correlation function as well as determine symmetry properties. To capture the essence of the mechanism of baryon formation with the minimum of algebraic complexity we consider the single flavor case in 2 + 1 space-time dimensions and twodimensional spin matrices.