We study baryons in multicolour 1+1D QCD via Rajeev's gauge-invariant
reformulation as a non-linear classical theory of a bilocal meson field
constrained to lie on a Grassmannian. It is known to reproduce 't Hooft's meson
spectrum via small oscillations around the vacuum, while baryons arise as
topological solitons. The lightest baryon has zero mass per colour in the
chiral limit; we find its form factor. It moves at the speed of light through a
family of massless states. To model excitations of this baryon, we linearize
equations for motion in the tangent space to the Grassmannian, parameterized by
a bilocal field U. A redundancy in U is removed and an approximation is made in
lieu of a consistency condition on U. The baryon spectrum is given by an
eigenvalue problem for a hermitian singular integral operator on such tangent
vectors. Excited baryons are like bound states of the lightest one with a
meson. Using a rank-1 ansatz for U in a variational formulation, we estimate
the mass and form factor of the first excitation.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, shorter published version, added remarks on
parit
