We review the spectrum and electromagnetic properties of baryons described as relativistic three-quark bound states within QCD. The composite nature of baryons results in a rich excitation spectrum, whilst leading to highly non-trivial structural properties explored by the coupling to external (electromagnetic and other) currents. Both present many unsolved problems despite decades of experimental and theoretical research. We discuss the progress in these fields from a theoretical perspective, focusing on nonperturbative QCD as encoded in the functional approach via Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations. We give a systematic overview as to how results are obtained in this framework and explain technical connections to lattice QCD. We also discuss the mutual relations to the quark model, which still serves as a reference to distinguish 'expected' from 'unexpected' physics. We confront recent results on the spectrum of non-strange and strange baryons, their form factors and the issues of two-photon processes and Compton scattering determined in the DysonSchwinger framework with those of lattice QCD and the available experimental data. The general aim is to identify the underlying physical mechanisms behind the plethora of observable phenomena in terms of the underlying quark and gluon degrees of freedom.

We show that electrically charged solutions within the Eddington-inspired Born–Infeld theory of gravity replace the central singularity by a wormhole supported by the electric field. As a result, the total energy associated with the electric field is finite and similar to that found in the Born–Infeld electromagnetic theory. When a certain charge-to-mass ratio is satisfied, in the lowest part of the mass and charge spectrum the event horizon disappears, yielding stable remnants. We argue that quantum effects in the matter sector can lower the mass of these remnants from the Planck scale down to the TeV scale.

We study ground states and excitations of light octet and decuplet baryons within the framework of Dyson-Schwinger and Faddeev equations. We improve upon similar approaches by explicitly taking into account the momentum-dependent dynamics of the quark-gluon interaction that leads to dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. We perform calculations in both the three-body Faddeev framework and the quark-diquark approximation in order to assess the impact of the latter on the spectrum. Our results indicate that both approaches agree well with each other. The resulting spectra furthermore agree one-to-one with experiment, provided well-known deficiencies of the rainbow-ladder approximation are compensated for. We also discuss the mass evolution of the Roper and the excited ∆ with varying pion mass and analyse the internal structure in terms of their partial wave decompositions.