Testing confining potentials through meson/baryon hyperfine splitting ratio

In this paper we discuss a quantity that can be derived from the hadronic spectrum - the ratio between the color hyperfine splitting of a K meson and that of a Sigma baryon. It will be shown that within the constituent quark model this ratio depends only on the ratio of contact probabilities within the hadrons. We compute this ratio assuming several phenomenological potential models, and show that the best agreement with data is obtained from the Cornell potential - Coulomb + linear. Thus the analysis of color hyperfine interactions corroborat es the preference for the Cornell potential based on quarkonium spectra.