Higgs fields, curved space, and hadron structure

It is shown that in completely unified Yang-Mills-Einstein-Higgs-type gauge theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking there exists the possibility that hadrons can be visualized as 'microuniverses' where the large curvature within a region of about 0.7 x 10-3cm arises from a large negative value of the VEV of the Hamiltonian. The low-lying collective excitations of the system have Hooke group symmetry and can be described as multiquasiparticle systems with oscillator-like energy spectra. The lowest states span reducible representations of SU(3) and correspondence with the naive nonrelativistic quark model can be established. Confinement and absence of nonzero triality excitations can be explained in a natural way. (author)