Relativistic three-quark bound states in separable two-quark approximation Original Research Article

Baryons as relativistic bound states in 3-quark correlations are described by an effective Bethe–Salpeter equation when irreducible 3-quark interactions are neglected and separable 2-quark correlations are assumed. We present an efficient numerical method to calculate the nucleon mass and its covariant wave function in this quantum field theoretic quark–diquark model with quark-exchange interaction. Expanding the components of the spinorial wave function in terms of Chebyshev polynomials, the four-dimensional integral equations are in a first step reduced to a coupled set of one-dimensional ones. This set of linear and homogeneous equations defines a generalised eigenvalue problem. Representing the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue, the Chebyshev moments are then obtained by iteration. The nucleon mass is implicitly determined by the eigenvalue, and its covariant wave function is reconstructed from the moments within the Chebyshev approximation.