Bound-state Approach to Strangeness in the Skyrme Model*

We show that baryons carrying heavy flavors, such as strangeness and charm, can be described by bound states of the corresponding heavy mesons in the background field of the basic SU(2) skyrmion. This method is quantitatively successful to O(N~ ~), in the sense of the large-N c expansion, but at O(1/N,.) it experiences problems associated with our lack of knowledge of higher-derivative terms in the Skyrme action. We derive a model-independent mass relation for strange baryons which is in excellent agreement with experiment.