Regge trajectories in the quark model

We prove that the large angular momentum behaviour of the leading Regge trajectory of a meson (qanti q) or a baryon (qqq) can be obtained by minimizing the classical energy of the system for given angular momentum. A two-body quark-antiquark linear potential plus relativistic kinematics produces asymptotically linear Regge trajectories for mesons. For baryons we take either a sum of two-body potentials with half strength or a string of minimum length connecting the quarks, and find in both cases that the favoured configuration is a quark-diquark system and that the baryon and meson trajectories have the same slope. Short-distance singularities of the potential are shown to be unimportant. (orig.)