Baryons and dual unitarization

Processes involving baryons are discussed in the scheme of dual unitarization. In particular, the topological expansion is generalized to any hadronic S-matrix elements involving baryons and/or mesons. The expansion is based on a model for the baryon propagator, which is a set of three planar Feynman diagrams joined at a junction line. The resulting expansion is a double expansion in 1/N (N = the number of quark flavours) and in the number of baryon loops. Based on this, several new observations are made in phenomenological problems, and a unifying point of view in stressed. The scheme is evidently crossing invariant, and unitarity constraints are imposed order by order in 1/N and in the baryon loop number. (author)