Hyperfine Splitting of Low-Lying Heavy Baryons

We calculate the next-to-leading order contribution to the masses of the heavy baryons in the bound state approach for baryons containing a heavy quark. These $1/N_C$ corrections arise when states of good spin and isospin are generated from the background soliton of the light meson fields. Our study is motivated by the previously established result that light vector meson fields are required for this soliton in order to reasonably describe the spectrum of both the light and the heavy baryons. We note that the inclusion of light vector mesons significantly improves the agreement of the predicted hyperfine splitting with experiment. A number of aspects of this somewhat complicated calculation are discussed in detail.