Baryon sum rules and chiral symmetry breaking

In an SVZ-type approach sum rules for baryonic currents have been investigated, without radiative QCD corrections but with the inclusion of non-perturbative terms due to the non-vanishing vacuum expectation value of the quark-antiquark condensate. We give upper bounds for baryon masses, which allow a choice of optimal interpolating operators for low-lying baryon states. The results show that the mentioned vacuum expectation value not only sets the scale for parity splitting but also for the masses of the baryons directly. The alternative way of explicit symmetry breaking by quark masses has also been investigated in the same technical framework.