Kaon excitation in the SU(3) Skyrme model

We attempt to improve the description of the strange baryons in the "collective" approach to quantizing the SU(3) Skyrme model. We go beyond the recent work of Yabu and Ando by employing a kind of "cranking" procedure for the strange fields, which allows them to contribute to the corresponding moment of inertia. A better overall fit to the mass differences of the low-lying ${\mathrm{½}}^{+}$ and ${\frac{3}{2}}^{+}$ baryons is achieved using values of parameters fixed from the meson sector. The picture of the baryons that emerges is one in which they contain appreciably fewer "$s\overline{s}$ current quark pairs" than in a naive perturbation approach. At the constitutent-quark level there is significant mixing of different SU(3) multiplets. This and a number of related points are treated.