Cranking an SU(3) symmetric chiral soliton

The chiral quark—meson model based on a linear σ model is extended to three flavours of quarks. For an SU(3)-symmetric version of the model we use a lowest-order cranking approach to calculate the splittings between the baryon multiplets. The isospin cranking which governs the octet—decuplet splitting is identical to that in the SU(2) model. The moment of inertia for “strange” rotations gives the energies of states which must involve mesonic excitations. It is found to be small, indicating that such states, if they exist, lie well above the nucleon.