Heavy Quark Solitons: Strangeness and Symmetry Breaking

We discuss the generalization of the Callan-Klebanov model to the case of heavy quark baryons. The light flavor group is considered to be $SU(3)$ and the limit of heavy spin symmetry is taken. The presence of the Wess-Zumino-Witten term permits the neat development of a picture , at the collective level, of a light diquark bound to a heavy" quark with decoupled spin degree of freedom. The consequences of $SU(3)$ symmetry breaking are discussed in detail. We point out that the $SU(3)$ mass splittings of the heavy baryons essentially measure the low energy" physics once more and that the comparison with experiment is satisfactory.